Histories — Book 5 (Terpsichore)

Herodotus · a new plain-English translation from the Greek

The Persians left behind in Europe by Darius, whom Megabazus commanded, first subdued the Perinthians of the Hellespont, who were unwilling to be subjects of Darius, though they had earlier been roughly handled by the Paeonians as well. For the Paeonians from the Strymon, on the god's instruction to campaign against the Perinthians, were told that if the Perinthians, encamped opposite them, should call out to them by name and challenge them, they were to attack; but if they were not called out to, they were not to attack. The Paeonians did just this.

When the Perinthians had encamped opposite them in the suburb, a threefold single combat arose there by challenge: man was matched against man, horse against horse, and dog against dog. The Perinthians won two of the three, and as they raised the paean in their joy, the Paeonians reckoned that this very thing was the fulfillment of the oracle, and said among themselves,

"Now surely the oracle is being fulfilled for us; now it is our work." So while the Perinthians were singing their paean, the Paeonians attacked them, and prevailed decisively, leaving few of them alive. That is how the earlier affair with the Paeonians came about. But now, when the Perinthians proved brave men in the cause of their freedom, the Persians and Megabazus prevailed by sheer numbers.

When Perinthus had been subdued, Megabazus marched his army through Thrace, bringing under the king's sway every city and every people settled in that region; for this had been enjoined upon him by Darius, to subdue Thrace. The Thracian people is the greatest of all mankind, after the Indians at least; and if it were ruled by one man, or were of one mind, it would be invincible and by far

the mightiest of all peoples, in my judgment. But since this is impossible for them and can never come about, they are for that reason weak. They have many names, each group according to its own region, but they all follow customs very much alike in every respect, except the Getae, the Trausi, and those settled above the Crestonaeans. Of these, what the Getae do, who claim to be immortal, has already been told

by me. The Trausi carry out all their other customs just as the rest of the Thracians do, but as regards one who is born and one who dies among them, they do this: when a child is born, the relatives sit around it and lament, reckoning up all the sufferings it must endure now that it has come into being, rehearsing every human woe; but when a man dies, they bury him in the earth with playfulness and rejoicing, saying that he is now rid of so many evils and is

in complete happiness. Those settled above the Crestonaeans do the following: each man has many wives; and whenever one of them dies, a great contest arises among the wives, with keen efforts on the part of their friends, over which of them was most loved by the husband; and whichever is judged and honored, praised by both men and women, is slaughtered over the grave by her nearest kinsman,

and having been slaughtered is buried together with her husband. The other wives count this a great misfortune, for it is reckoned the greatest disgrace to them. Among the rest of the Thracians the custom is this: they sell their children to be taken abroad. They do not guard their unmarried daughters, but let them have intercourse with whatever men they wish; their wives, however, they guard strictly, and they buy their wives from the parents

for great sums of money. To be tattooed is reckoned a mark of noble birth, and to be without tattoos a mark of low birth. To be idle is considered most honorable, and to work the land most dishonorable; to live by war and plunder is considered most honorable of all. These are their most notable customs. They worship only the following gods: Ares, Dionysus, and Artemis. But their kings, apart from the rest of the citizens, worship Hermes above all the gods,

and swear only by him, and say that they themselves are descended from Hermes. The burial customs for their wealthy men are these: they lay out the corpse for three days, and after slaughtering all sorts of victims they feast, having first mourned; then they bury the body, either burning it or otherwise hiding it in the earth, and after heaping up a mound they hold games of every kind, in which the greatest prizes are set for single combat, as is fitting. Such then

are the burial customs of the Thracians. As for the region north of this country, no one can say for certain what people inhabit it, but already beyond the Ister the land appears to be empty and boundless. The only people I can learn of dwelling beyond the Ister are those called Sigynnae, who wear Median dress; their horses

are said to be shaggy over their whole body to a depth of five fingers' breadth of hair, small, snub-nosed, and unable to carry men, but when yoked to chariots they are extremely swift; and it is for this reason that the local people drive chariots. Their borders reach close to the Enetoi who live on the Adriatic. They say they are colonists of the Medes. How they came to be colonists of the Medes

I myself cannot explain, but anything might happen in the long course of time. In any case, the people whom the Ligurians who live inland above Massalia call Sigynnae are what the Cyprians call peddlers, and spears are called sigynnae by the Cyprians. As the Thracians tell it, bees occupy the land beyond the Ister, and because of them it is impossible to travel further in that direction.

To me, however, those who say this seem to be saying something implausible, for those creatures are evidently unable to endure cold; rather it seems to me that the regions under the Bear are uninhabited because of the cold. This, then, is what is said about this country; but Megabazus made the coastal parts of it subject to the Persians. As for Darius, as soon as he had crossed the Hellespont and arrived at Sardis, he remembered the good service done him by Histiaeus of Miletus

and the advice of Coes of Mytilene, and summoning them to Sardis he offered each of them his choice of a reward. Histiaeus, since he was already tyrant of Miletus, did not ask for any tyranny at all, but asked for Myrcinus in the land of the Edonians, wishing to found a city there. This, then, is what he chose; but Coes, since he was not a tyrant but a private citizen, asked to become tyrant of Mytilene. When both

requests had been granted, each of them went off to pursue what he had chosen; but Darius, as it happened, came to see something that made him desire to instruct Megabazus to capture the Paeonians and forcibly remove them from Europe to Asia. There were two Paeonian men, Pigres and Mantyes, who, once Darius had crossed over into Asia, being themselves eager to become tyrants of the Paeonians, came to Sardis, bringing with them their sister, who was tall and beautiful. Having watched

for a time when Darius was seated in state in the suburb of the Lydians, they did the following: having adorned their sister as well as they could, they sent her for water, carrying a jar on her head, leading a horse by its bridle from her arm, and spinning flax as she went. When the woman passed by, it caught Darius's attention; for what the woman was doing was neither Persian nor Lydian custom, nor

anything like the customs of the peoples of Asia at all. Since it had caught his attention, he dispatched some of his spearmen with orders to observe how the woman would deal with the horse. So they followed along behind her, and when she reached the river, she watered the horse, and having watered it and filled the jar with water, she passed back along the same road, carrying the water on

her head, leading the horse by the bridle from her arm, and turning her spindle. Darius, marveling both at what he heard from his scouts and at what he saw himself, ordered her to be brought before him. When she was brought, her brothers were also present, having been watching from not far off. When Darius asked her what country she was from, the

young men said that they were Paeonians, and that she was their sister. He answered by asking who the Paeonians were as a people, and where in the world they lived, and what they wanted in coming to Sardis. Their reply was that they had come intending to hand themselves over to him, and that Paeonia was a land settled on the river Strymon, the Strymon not far from the Hellespont,

and that they were colonists of the Teucrians from Troy. This is what they told him, each point in turn, and he asked whether all the women there were such hard workers. They said that this was indeed eagerly so, for it was for this very reason that she had been made to do it. At this Darius wrote a letter to Megabazus, whom he had left as general in Thrace, instructing him to uproot

the Paeonians from their homes and bring them to him, both the people themselves and their children and wives. At once a horseman ran off carrying the message to the Hellespont, and having crossed over gave the letter to Megabazus. He, having read it and taking guides from Thrace, marched against Paeonia. When the Paeonians learned that the Persians were coming against them, they gathered together

and marched out toward the sea, expecting that the Persians would attempt to invade by that route. The Paeonians, then, were ready to check Megabazus's advancing army; but the Persians, learning that the Paeonians had assembled and were guarding the approach from the sea, took guides and turned onto the inland road instead, and without the Paeonians' knowledge fell upon their cities, which were empty of men; and falling upon them while empty

they took them easily. When the Paeonians learned that their cities were held, they at once scattered, each man going his own way, and gave themselves up to the Persians. Thus of the Paeonians the Siriopaeonians and the Paeoplae, and those as far as Lake Prasias, were uprooted from their homes and led away into Asia. But those around Mount Pangaeum, and Doberes, and the Agrianes, and the Odomanti, and Lake

Prasias itself were not at first subdued by Megabazus; he did, however, attempt to remove those settled on the lake in the following manner. Platforms fastened upon tall piles stand in the middle of the lake, with a single narrow approach from the mainland by one bridge. The piles that support the platforms were originally set up jointly by all the citizens in common, but afterward

They follow this custom in setting up their dwellings: bringing timber down from the mountain called Orbelos, each man who marries sets up three stakes for each wife he takes—and each man takes many wives. They live in this fashion: each holds his own hut on the platforms, where he lives, and there is a trapdoor through the platform leading down to the lake. They tie the little children

by the foot with a cord, fearing that they might roll down into the water. To their horses and pack animals they give fish as fodder, and fish are so abundant that when a man opens the trapdoor and lets down an empty basket on a rope into the lake, after waiting only a short time he draws it up full of fish. There are two kinds of these fish, which they call papraх and tilon. As for the Paeonians,

those who had been subdued were led away to Asia. Once Megabazus had subdued the Paeonians, he sent messengers to Macedonia—seven Persians ranking, after himself, as the most eminent men in the army. These were sent to Amyntas to demand earth and water for King Darius. There is a very direct route from Lake Prasias to Macedonia: first

there lies next to the lake the mine from which, later on, a talent of silver came in to Alexander every day, and beyond the mine, once one has crossed the mountain called Dysoron, one is in Macedonia. So when these Persians who had been sent arrived at Amyntas's court, they came into his presence and asked for earth and water on behalf of King Darius. And he gave these

and invited them to be his guests, and having prepared a magnificent dinner he received the Persians hospitably. When the meal was over, as they sat drinking, the Persians said this: "Macedonian host, it is our custom among the Persians, whenever we set out a great feast, then to bring in our concubines and wedded wives as well to sit beside us. You, then, since you have received us so eagerly and entertain us so lavishly, and since you give

earth and water to King Darius, follow our custom." Amyntas answered them thus: "Persians, that is not our custom here; among us men and women are kept apart. But since you, as our masters, request this, it shall be granted to you as well." Having said this much, Amyntas sent for the women, and when they came at his summons, they sat down in a row facing

the Persians. Then the Persians, seeing the beautiful women, said to Amyntas that what had been done was not wise at all: it would have been better from the start for the women not to come at all than to come and sit opposite them rather than beside them, a torment to their eyes. Amyntas, under compulsion, ordered the women to sit beside them; and when the women obeyed, the Persians at once began fondling their breasts, being rather far gone in wine, and

some of them even tried to kiss them. Amyntas, seeing this, held himself still, though he was distressed, for he was in great fear of the Persians. But Alexander, Amyntas's son, who stood by watching all this unfold, being young and untried by hardship, could no longer contain himself, and being sorely aggrieved said this to Amyntas: "Father, you should yield to your age

and go withdraw and rest, and not press yourself further with the drinking; I will remain here myself and provide everything needful for our guests." At this Amyntas, understanding that Alexander intended to do something rash, said, "My son, I understand from your heated words, since you are on fire, that you wish to send me away so as to do something rash. I ask you, then, not to act rashly against these men,

so that you do not ruin us, but bear with watching what is being done; as for my own departure, I will follow your advice on that." When Amyntas, having asked this, had gone away, Alexander said to the Persians, "Guests, as regards these women, you have full freedom to lie with all of them, or with as many of them as you wish. On this matter you yourselves may declare your pleasure. But now, since

the hour of retiring to bed is already approaching for you, and I see you are in a fine state from your drinking, allow these women, if it is agreeable to you, to go and bathe, and after bathing receive them back again." Having said this—for the Persians agreed—he sent the women out to the women's quarters, and Alexander himself dressed an equal number of beardless young men in the women's clothing, and giving them daggers

led them in, bringing them before the Persians and saying this: "Persians, it seems you have been feasted with a complete banquet: for everything else we had, and whatever else we could find and provide, all this is at your disposal, and above all this, the greatest thing of all, we lavish upon you our own mothers and sisters, so that you may fully learn that you are honored by us

as much as you deserve, and further that you may tell the king who sent you here how a Greek man, governor of the Macedonians, received you well both at table and in bed." Having said this, Alexander seated a Macedonian man beside each Persian man, in the guise, in word, of a woman; and these men, when the Persians tried to touch them, killed them. And so they perished by this fate, they

and their attendants as well; for there had followed them their carriages and servants and all their great equipage—all this together with all of them vanished. Not long afterward a great search for these men was mounted by the Persians, and Alexander suppressed it by cunning, giving much money and his own sister, whose name

was Gygaea; giving these, Alexander bought off Bubares, a Persian man, one of those searching for the lost men, on behalf of the general. Thus the death of these Persians was covered up and passed over in silence. That these men, the descendants of Perdiccas, are Greek, as they themselves say, I myself happen to know to be so, and I will indeed demonstrate in the following account that they are Greeks; and further,

the Hellenodicae who administer the contest at Olympia have also judged it to be so. For when Alexander chose to compete and came down for that very purpose, his prospective Greek rivals in the footrace sought to bar him, claiming the contest was open to Greeks only and not open to barbarians; but Alexander, when he proved that he was an Argive, was judged to be Greek, and competing in the stadion race he tied for first place. Such, then,

is how that came about. Megabazus, leading the Paeonians, arrived at the Hellespont; from there, having crossed over, he arrived at Sardis. Since Histiaeus of Miletus was already fortifying the place he had asked of Darius as a reward for guarding the bridge—the place being by the river Strymon, called Myrcinus—Megabazus, learning what Histiaeus was doing,

as soon as he arrived at Sardis leading the Paeonians, said this to Darius: "O king, what a thing you have done, in allowing a clever and capable Greek man to found a city in Thrace, where there is abundant timber for shipbuilding and many oars and silver mines, and where a great crowd, both Greek and non-Greek, dwells around, who, once they get a leader, will do

whatever he directs, day and night. You, then, must stop this man from doing these things, lest you become embroiled in a war at home; stop him by summoning him in some gentle manner. And once you have got hold of him, see to it that he never returns to the Greeks again." By saying this, Megabazus easily persuaded Darius, since it seemed he foresaw well what was going to happen. Then, sending a messenger to

Myrcinus, Darius said this: "Histiaeus, King Darius says this: as I reflect, I find that there is no man more well-disposed to me and to my affairs than you; and this I know not from words but from deeds I have witnessed. Now then, since I am planning to accomplish great undertakings, come to me by all means, so that I may lay these plans before you." Trusting these words, Histiaeus, and at the same time

making it a great thing to become the king's counselor, came to Sardis; and when he arrived, Darius said this to him: "Histiaeus, I summoned you for this reason. From the moment I returned from the Scythians and you passed out of my sight, I have sought nothing else so urgently in so short a time as to see you and to come to speech with you, knowing that of all possessions the most precious is

a friend who is wise and well-disposed, qualities which I know you possess in both respects and can attest to regarding my own affairs. Now then, since you have done well in coming, I propose this to you: leave Miletus and the newly founded city in Thrace, and follow me to Susa, where you shall have what I have, as my table companion and counselor."

Having said this, Darius, after appointing Artaphrenes, his own brother by the same father, to be governor of Sardis, drove away to Susa, taking Histiaeus with him, and having appointed Otanes to be general of the men along the coast. Otanes's father Sisamnes, who had been one of the royal judges, King Cambyses had put to death and flayed entirely, because he had given an unjust judgment for money; and having stripped off his skin, he cut it into strips

and stretched them over the seat on which Sisamnes used to sit in judgment. Having stretched it, Cambyses appointed as judge in place of Sisamnes, whom he had killed and flayed, the son of Sisamnes, instructing him to remember, when seated on that seat, what judgments he gave. This Otanes, then, who sat upon that seat, having now become Megabazus's successor in the command, took Byzantium and Chalcedon,

and took Antandros in the Troad, and took Lamponion; and having taken ships from the Lesbians, he took Lemnos and Imbros, both of which were still at that time inhabited by Pelasgians. The Lemnians fought well and, defending themselves, were worn down over time; and over the survivors of them the Persians set as governor Lycaretus, brother of Maeandrius, who had been king of Samos. This man

Lycaretus, the governor of Lemnos, died. This was the reason: he had been enslaving and subjugating everyone, accusing some of desertion from the campaign against the Scythians, and others of harming Darius' army as it made its way back from the Scythians. Such were his accomplishments as governor. Not long after, there was a lull in troubles, and then, for the second time, misfortunes began to arise for the Ionians, this time from Naxos and Miletus.

Naxos surpassed the other islands in prosperity, and at the same time Miletus itself, then at the very height of its own power, was the pride of Ionia. Yet in the two generations before this, Miletus had been afflicted by civil strife of the worst kind, until the Parians restored order there; for the Milesians chose the Parians, out of all the Greeks, as their arbitrators.

The Parians reconciled them in this way. When their best men arrived in Miletus and saw how terribly ruined the estates were, they said they wished to go through the countryside. As they did this, passing through the whole territory of Miletus, whenever they saw a well-cultivated field amid the devastated land, they wrote down the name of the field's owner.

After driving through the whole territory and finding only a few such men, as soon as they came down to the city they called an assembly and declared that these men, whose fields they had found well cultivated, should govern the city; for they said they believed these men would take care of public affairs just as they had cared for their own. As for the rest of the Milesians, who had previously been rioting, they ordered them to obey these men. Thus did the Parians restore order to Miletus.

It was from these cities that troubles now began to come upon Ionia in this way. Certain wealthy men were exiled from Naxos by the common people, and in their flight they came to Miletus. It happened that the guardian of Miletus at that time was Aristagoras son of Molpagoras, who was both son-in-law and cousin of Histiaeus son of Lysagoras, whom Darius was keeping at Susa; for Histiaeus was tyrant of Miletus,

and he happened to be in Susa at that time, when the Naxians, who had previously been guest-friends of Histiaeus, arrived. Coming to Miletus, the Naxians asked Aristagoras whether he might somehow supply them with a force so that they could return to their own land. He, reasoning that if they returned to their city through his agency he would rule Naxos, put forward as his pretext

his guest-friendship with Histiaeus, and made this proposal to them: "I myself am not able to supply you with a force great enough to bring you back against the will of the Naxians who now hold the city; for I hear that the Naxians have eight thousand shields and many long ships. But I will contrive something, using all diligence. Here is my plan. Artaphrenes happens to be a friend of mine, and Artaphrenes is son of Hystaspes

and brother of King Darius, and he commands all the peoples along the sea in Asia, with a large army and many ships. I think this man will do whatever we ask of him." Hearing this, the Naxians left it to Aristagoras to act as best he could, and told him to promise gifts and provisions for the army, which they themselves would repay, having great hopes

that once they appeared before Naxos, the Naxians would do everything they commanded, and likewise the other islanders too; for none of these Cycladic islands was yet under Darius. Arriving at Sardis, Aristagoras told Artaphrenes that Naxos was an island not great in size, but otherwise fair and

good, and near Ionia, and that it had much wealth and many slaves. "So lead an expedition against this land, restoring to it the exiles from it. If you do this, in the first place I have great sums of money ready for you, over and above what will be spent on the army—for it is only right that we who are leading the expedition should provide this—and in the second place you will win for the king islands,

Naxos itself and those that depend on it, Paros, Andros, and the others called the Cyclades. And setting out from there, you will easily attack Euboea, a large and prosperous island, no smaller than Cyprus and very easy to capture. A hundred ships would suffice to subdue all of these." Artaphrenes replied to him thus: "You are proposing an excellent course of action for the house of the king,

and all your advice is good, except for the number of ships. Instead of a hundred ships, two hundred will be ready for you by spring. But the king himself must also give his consent to these plans." When Aristagoras heard this, he was overjoyed and went back to Miletus. Artaphrenes, once he had sent to Susa and reported what Aristagoras had said,

and Darius himself had also given his consent, prepared two hundred triremes and a very great host of Persians and other allies, and appointed as their commander Megabates, a Persian of the Achaemenids, cousin to both himself and Darius—whose daughter, if the story is indeed true, Pausanias son of Cleombrotus the Lacedaemonian later married, having conceived a desire

to become tyrant of Greece. Having appointed Megabates as commander, Artaphrenes sent the army off to Aristagoras. Megabates took Aristagoras from Miletus, along with the Ionian force and the Naxians, and sailed, ostensibly for the Hellespont; but when he reached Chios, he put in with the fleet at Caucasa, so that from there he could cross to Naxos with a north wind. And since it was not fated

for the Naxians to be destroyed by this expedition, the following incident occurred. As Megabates was going around inspecting the watches on the ships, it happened that no one was standing guard on a Myndian ship. Enraged at this, he ordered his spearmen to find the commander of this ship, whose name was Scylax, and to bind him by passing him through an oar-hole of the ship in such a way that his head was outside and his body inside.

When Scylax had been bound in this way, someone reported to Aristagoras that Megabates had tied up his guest-friend the Myndian and was mistreating him. Aristagoras went and pleaded with the Persian on his behalf, but got nothing of what he asked for, so he went himself and released the man. When Megabates learned of this, he was greatly angered and grew furious with Aristagoras, who said to him, "What business is this of yours and these matters?

Did not Artaphrenes send you to obey me and to sail wherever I order? Why do you meddle in so much?" So spoke Aristagoras. Megabates, enraged by this, when night came, sent men by boat to Naxos to tell the Naxians everything that was in store for them. For the Naxians had not at all expected that this expedition was setting out against them. When, however,

they learned of it, they immediately brought in their possessions from the fields into the city wall, prepared food and drink as if to withstand a siege, and strengthened the wall. So they made ready as men expecting war to come upon them; and when the enemy had crossed over their ships from Chios to Naxos, they attacked a people already fortified, and besieged them for four months. When the money the Persians

had brought with them was used up, and Aristagoras himself had spent a great deal in addition, and the siege demanded still more, at that point they built forts for the Naxian exiles and withdrew to the mainland in bad shape. Aristagoras was unable to fulfill his promise to Artaphrenes; at the same time, he was pressed by the demand for repayment of the army's expenses, and he was afraid on account of the army's failure

and of having been slandered by Megabates, and he thought he would be deprived of the rule of Miletus. Fearing all these things, he began to plot a revolt; for it happened that at the same time the man with the tattooed head arrived from Susa from Histiaeus, signaling that it was time for Aristagoras to break away from the king's rule. Histiaeus, wishing to signal to Aristagoras to revolt, had no other safe way of doing so, since the roads were guarded, so he

shaved the head of his most trusted slave, tattooed it, and waited for the hair to grow back. As soon as it had grown back, he sent the man to Miletus with no other instructions except that, when he arrived in Miletus, he should tell Aristagoras to shave his hair and examine what was on his scalp. The tattoo marks signaled, as I have said before, revolt. Histiaeus did this because he considered

his detention at Susa a great misfortune; for he cherished strong hopes that, should an uprising break out, he would be sent down to the coast, but that if Miletus made no new move, he reckoned he would never return there again. With this in mind, then, Histiaeus sent off his messenger, and all these things happened to coincide for Aristagoras at the same time. So he took counsel with his partisans, revealing to them both

his own opinion and what had come from Histiaeus. All the others expressed the same view, urging revolt; but Hecataeus the logographer first advised against taking up war with the king of the Persians at all, listing all the nations Darius ruled over and his power. When he failed to persuade them, he then advised, as a second course, that they should make themselves masters

of the sea. He said he could see no way for this to come about otherwise, for he knew that the power of the Milesians was weak; but that if the treasures were taken down from the temple at Branchidae, which Croesus the Lydian had dedicated, he had great hopes they could gain mastery of the sea, and in this way they themselves would have the use of the money, and the enemy would not plunder it.

This treasure was great, as I have shown in the first of my accounts. This proposal did not prevail; nevertheless the decision for rebellion was taken, together with a plan that one of their number would voyage to Myus, where the expedition that had withdrawn from Naxos lay encamped, and there attempt to arrest the generals sailing aboard the ships. Iatragoras having been sent off for this very purpose

After Iobates' son had treacherously seized Oliatus of Mylasa, and Histiaeus son of Tymnes had seized Hermon of Termera, and Coes son of Erxander—the man on whom Darius had bestowed Mytilene—along with Aristagoras son of Heraclides of Cyme, and many others besides, Aristagoras now revolted openly, contriving everything against Darius. First he gave up the tyranny in name only and established equal rights under law at Miletus, so that the Milesians would join his revolt willingly. Then

he did the same thing in the rest of Ionia, driving out some of the tyrants; and those tyrants he had taken from the ships that had sailed together against Naxos he handed over to their own cities, wishing to win favor with them, giving each man back to whatever city he came from. As for Coes, the Mytilenaeans, as soon as they got hold of him, took him out and stoned him to death; the people of Cyme, however, let their own man

go free, and most of the others released theirs as well. So the removal of the tyrants took place throughout the cities. And when Aristagoras of Miletus had put down the tyrants, he ordered that generals be appointed in each of the cities, and then he himself set out as an envoy by trireme to Lacedaemon; for he needed to find some great ally. Now at Sparta, Anaxandrides son of Leon was no longer

alive to be king, for he had died, and Cleomenes son of Anaxandrides held the kingship—not because of any merit, but by right of birth. Anaxandrides, in fact, had married his own sister's daughter, and though she was dear to him, they had no children. Since this was the state of affairs, the ephors summoned him and said, "If you yourself will not look out for your own interest, we cannot allow this to go unwatched—that the line

of Eurysthenes should die out. You now have a wife, but since she bears you no children, divorce her and marry another; if you do this you will please the Spartans." He answered that he would do neither of these things, and that they were not giving him good advice in urging him to send away the wife he had, who was blameless toward him, and take another in her place; he would not obey them. In response to this the ephors and

the elders took counsel and put the following proposal to Anaxandrides. "Since we see that you cling to the wife you have, then do as we say and do not oppose us, lest the Spartans decide on some other course concerning you. We are not asking you to send away the wife you have; keep giving her everything you now provide, and in addition to her bring in another wife who can bear children."

Speaking to him in this way, they persuaded him, and afterward he kept two wives and maintained two separate households, doing nothing that was customary for a Spartan. Not much time passed before the wife who had come to him later bore this Cleomenes. And she thereby produced an heir to the kingship for the Spartans, while the earlier wife, who had been childless all that time, then somehow became pregnant, as it happened by coincidence. Now while she was

truly pregnant, the relatives of the second wife, on learning of it, made trouble, saying she was boasting falsely and wanted to substitute a child. And since they made such an uproar, and the time was drawing near, the ephors, out of distrust, sat around the woman and watched her give birth. She, once she had borne Dorieus, immediately conceived Leonidas, and right after him immediately conceived Cleombrotus; though some say that Cleombrotus and Leonidas were twins.

The woman who bore Cleomenes, the second wife who had come to him, was the daughter of Prinetadas son of Demarmenus, and she did not bear a second child. Now Cleomenes, as is said, was not sound of mind, in fact quite mad, whereas Dorieus was first among all his peers in age, and he was well aware that he himself would hold the kingship by his own merit. Being of this mind, then, when Anaxandrides

died and the Lacedaemonians, following their custom, established the eldest, Cleomenes, as king, Dorieus, taking this hard and not thinking it right to be ruled by Cleomenes, asked for a body of people and led them out as a colony, without consulting the oracle at Delphi as to what land he should go found, and without doing any of the customary things. Bearing this heavily, he sent his ships off to Libya;

and men of Thera guided him there. On arriving in Libya he settled the finest region of the Libyans, beside the river Cinyps. But driven out from there in the third year by the Macae, a Libyan people, and by the Carthaginians, he came to the Peloponnese. There Antichares, a man of Eleon, advised him, on the basis of the oracles of Laius, to found Heraclea in Sicily, saying that the whole territory of Eryx belonged to the Heraclidae, since Heracles himself

had acquired it. On hearing this he went to Delphi to consult the oracle, whether he would take the land to which he was setting out; and the Pythia declared that he would take it. So Dorieus took up the same expedition he had led to Libya, and sailed along the coast of Italy. At that time, as the people of Sybaris say, they themselves together with Telys their king were

about to march against Croton, and the Crotonians, becoming very afraid, begged Dorieus to help them, and got what they asked; Dorieus, they say, joined the campaign against Sybaris and helped to take it. This is what the Sybarites say Dorieus and his men did, but the Crotonians say that no foreigner joined their side in the war against Sybaris except Callias the Iamid, a seer from Elis, and him alone,

and even him in the following way: he had fled to them from Telys, tyrant of the Sybarites, because when he sacrificed against Croton the omens did not turn out favorable. This is what these people say. Each side offers proof of its claims: the Sybarites point to a sacred precinct and temple beside the dry Crathis, which they say Dorieus, after taking the city, established for Athena with the epithet Crathia; and this,

they say, is the greatest proof—the death of Dorieus himself—for they say he perished because he did what was contrary to the oracle's instructions; for if he had done nothing beside what he was sent to do, he would have taken the territory of Eryx and, having taken it, held it, and neither he nor his army would have perished. The Crotonians, for their part, point out that Callias of Elis was given choice lands in Crotoniate territory,

much of it, which even down to my time Callias' descendants still hold, while Dorieus and his descendants got nothing. Yet if Dorieus had actually taken part in the Sybarite war, far more would have been given to him than to Callias. These, then, are the proofs each side puts forward, and anyone may side with whichever party he finds convincing. Other Spartans also sailed with Dorieus as fellow founders—Thessalus,

Paraebates, Celees, and Euryleon; and when they arrived in Sicily with the whole expedition, they were defeated in battle and killed by the Phoenicians and the people of Egesta. Of the fellow founders, only Euryleon survived this disaster. Gathering together the survivors of the army, he took Minoa, the colony of the Selinuntians, and helped free the Selinuntians from their sole ruler Peithagoras; and afterward, once he had put an end to him,

he himself attempted to seize the tyranny of Selinus and ruled alone for a short time; for the Selinuntians rose up against him and killed him as he had taken refuge at the altar of Zeus of the marketplace. Dorieus was accompanied and died together with Philip son of Butacides, a man of Croton, who had become betrothed to the daughter of Telys the Sybarite and fled Croton; but cheated of the marriage, he sailed off to Cyrene, and setting out from there he had joined the expedition with his own trireme and

his own crew paid at his own expense, being an Olympic victor and the handsomest of the Greeks of his time. Because of his beauty he received from the people of Egesta an honor no one else received: they built a shrine over his tomb and propitiate him with sacrifices. Dorieus, then, met his end in this way; but if he had put up with being ruled by Cleomenes and had stayed in Sparta, he would have become king of Lacedaemon; for

Cleomenes did not rule for very long, but died without a son, leaving only a daughter whose name was Gorgo. Aristagoras, the tyrant of Miletus, arrived at Sparta while Cleomenes still held power; and he came before him for a conversation, as the Lacedaemonians say, carrying a bronze tablet on which was engraved a map of the whole earth, with every sea and every river marked. Coming

before him for the conversation, Aristagoras spoke to him as follows: "Cleomenes, do not be surprised at my eagerness in coming here; for the matter at hand is this: it is a disgrace, and the greatest source of grief, that the sons of the Ionians are slaves rather than free—grief for us most of all, but also, beyond that, for you, insofar as you stand at the head of Greece. Now then, in the name of the gods of the Greeks, rescue

the Ionians, men of your own blood, from slavery. This is a thing easy for you to accomplish, for the barbarians are not valiant in war, while you have brought your skill in warfare to the highest pitch of excellence; and their manner of fighting is this: bow and short spear. Into battle they go clad in trousers, with felt caps on their heads. So they are easy to conquer.

Moreover, the people who inhabit that continent possess good things such as no other peoples together possess, beginning with gold, and then silver and bronze and embroidered clothing and pack animals and slaves; all these you could have for yourselves, if you wished. They are settled next to one another as I shall show you: here, next to these Ionians, are the Lydians, who inhabit a good land and are very rich in silver." As he said

this he pointed to the world map that he had brought along, engraved on the tablet. "Next to the Lydians," Aristagoras went on, "come the Phrygians here, to the east, who have more flocks than any people I know, along with crops richer than anyone else's. Bordering the Phrygians are the Cappadocians, whom we call Syrians. Bordering these are the Cilicians, reaching down to this sea here, in which lies this island of Cyprus;

they pay the King five hundred talents as their yearly tribute. Next to these Cilicians come these Armenians here, who likewise have many flocks, and next to the Armenians the Matieni, who hold this land here. Next to these comes this land, Cissia, in which, beside this river here, the Choaspes, lies Susa itself, the place where the Great King keeps his court, and where the treasuries of his wealth

That is where they live. Once you have taken this city you can confidently vie with Zeus himself for wealth. But is it really necessary that for the sake of a small and not very good stretch of land, and narrow borders, you should keep putting off battles against the Messenians, who are your equals in strength, and against the Arcadians and Argives, none of whom have anything to do with gold or silver, for which some men are driven by

eagerness to die fighting—when it is open to you to rule all of Asia with ease, will you choose something else instead?" So spoke Aristagoras, and Cleomenes answered him thus: "My Milesian guest-friend, I put off my answer to you until the third day." At that point they took the matter that far. But when the appointed day for the answer came and they met at the agreed place, Cleomenes asked Aristagoras how many days'

long the road ran from the Ionian coast up to the King. Now Aristagoras, clever as he was in other respects and skilled at deceiving that man, slipped up here: for since he wanted to lead the Spartiates out into Asia, he ought not to have told the truth, but he did tell it, saying that the journey inland was three months. Cleomenes seized on the rest of what Aristagoras was setting out to say

about the road, and said: "My Milesian guest-friend, be gone from Sparta before the sun sets. You are proposing nothing agreeable to the Lacedaemonians, wanting to lead them a three-months' journey from the sea." Having said this Cleomenes went off to his house, and Aristagoras took an olive branch as a suppliant and went to Cleomenes' house; entering as a suppliant he asked to be heard, and asked Cleomenes to send away

the child—for Cleomenes' daughter was standing beside him, whose name was Gorgo; she happened to be his only child, about eight or nine years old. Cleomenes told him to say what he wanted and not to hold back on the child's account. Then Aristagoras began by promising ten talents if Cleomenes would grant what he asked. When Cleomenes refused,

Aristagoras kept raising the sum, until he had promised fifty talents, at which point the child cried out, "Father, this stranger will corrupt you, if you don't get up and leave." Cleomenes, pleased at the child's advice, went into another room, and Aristagoras left Sparta altogether, and had no further opportunity to explain anything more

about the journey up to the King. The matter of this road stands as follows: everywhere along it there are royal way-stations and excellent lodgings, and the whole road runs through inhabited and safe country. Through Lydia and Phrygia there are twenty stations, and ninety-four and a half parasangs. Next after Phrygia comes the river Halys, at

which there are gates that one must absolutely pass through, and so cross the river, and there is a great garrison post there. Having crossed into Cappadocia and traveling through it as far as the borders of Cilicia, there are twenty-eight stations, and a hundred and four parasangs. On these borders you will pass through two sets of gates and past two garrison posts.

Once past these and making one's way through Cilicia, there are three stations, and fifteen and a half parasangs. The border of Cilicia and Armenia is a navigable river named the Euphrates. In Armenia there are fifteen stations with lodgings, and fifty-six and a half parasangs, with a garrison post among them. From this Armenia, crossing into

the land of Matiene, there are thirty-four stations, and a hundred and thirty-seven parasangs. Four navigable rivers flow through this land, which one must absolutely cross by ferry: the Tigris first of all, and after it two more, a second and a third, each bearing that same name, yet not the same river as one another nor fed from the same source. The first of these mentioned flows

from Armenia, and the second later one from the Matieni. The fourth of the rivers is called the Gyndes, which Cyrus once split into three hundred and sixty channels. Crossing from this land into the Cissian country, there are eleven stations, and forty-two and a half parasangs, as far as the river Choaspes, which is likewise navigable; on it stands the city of Susa. These

stations altogether number a hundred and eleven. Such is the count of lodging-stations for one traveling inland from Sardis up to Susa. Now supposing the royal road has been correctly measured in parasangs, and a parasang is worth thirty stades—as indeed it is—then from Sardis to the palace called Memnonian the distance is thirteen thousand five hundred stades, the parasangs being

four hundred and fifty. Traveling a hundred and fifty stades each day, the journey uses up exactly ninety days. So when the Milesian Aristagoras told Cleomenes the Lacedaemonian that the journey up to the King was three months, he spoke correctly. But if anyone wants a more precise figure still, I will give that too: for one must add to this

the road from Ephesus to Sardis. And I say that the total number of stades from the Greek sea to Susa (for that is what the city of Memnon is called) is fourteen thousand and forty; for from Ephesus to Sardis it is five hundred and forty stades, and so the three-month journey is lengthened by three days. Having been driven out of Sparta, Aristagoras went to Athens,

which had become free of its tyrants in the following way. After Hipparchus, son of Pisistratus and brother of the tyrant Hippias, had seen in a dream a vision that most vividly foretold his own fate, and was then killed by Aristogeiton and Harmodius, men of Gephyraean stock by origin, the Athenians were ruled as tyrants for four more years no less harshly but even more so than before. Now this was Hipparchus's dream: on the

night before the Panathenaea, Hipparchus dreamed that a tall and handsome man stood over him and spoke these riddling verses: "Endure, lion, enduring the unendurable with an enduring heart: no man who does wrong will go unpunished." As soon as day came, he openly consulted dream-interpreters about this; then, dismissing the vision, he sent out the procession, in which he met his death. As for the Gephyraeans, to whom

the killers of Hipparchus belonged, by their own account they originally came from Eretria, but as I find by inquiry, they were Phoenicians, among those who came with Cadmus to the land now called Boeotia, and they settled in the portion of that land allotted to them, the Tanagraean district. From there, the Argives first drove out the Cadmeans, and afterward the Boeotians in turn expelled these Gephyraeans

and turned toward Athens. The Athenians received them as citizens of their own on stated terms, imposing on them restrictions of many kinds not worth recounting. These Phoenicians who came with Cadmus, of whom the Gephyraeans were part, after settling in this land, introduced among the Greeks a number of skills, and in particular writing, which the Greeks did not have before, as it seems to me,

at first using the letters that all Phoenicians use; but as time passed, together with their language, they also changed the form of the letters. At that time the Greeks who lived around them in most of these regions were Ionians, who learned the letters through instruction from the Phoenicians and adopted them, changing their form slightly, and in using them called them, as was only right since the Phoenicians had brought them into

Greece, Phoenician letters. And the Ionians from ancient times call books "skins," because once, in a scarcity of papyrus, they used the skins of goats and sheep; and even in my own time many foreign peoples still write on such skins. I myself have also seen Cadmean letters at Thebes in Boeotia, inside the shrine of Apollo of Ismenus,

engraved on certain tripods, mostly similar to the Ionic letters. One of the tripods bears the inscription: "Amphitryon dedicated me from the spoils of the Teleboae." This would date to about the time of Laius, son of Labdacus, son of Polydorus, son of Cadmus. Another tripod says, in hexameter verse: "Scaeus the boxer, having won, dedicated me to far-shooting Apollo, a very beautiful offering." This Scaeus

would be the son of Hippocoon, if indeed it is he who made the dedication and not someone else bearing the same name as the son of Hippocoon, dating to about the time of Oedipus, son of Laius. A third tripod also says, in hexameter: "Laodamas, while sole ruler, himself dedicated this tripod to keen-sighted Apollo, a very beautiful offering." It was in the time of this Laodamas, son of Eteocles, as sole ruler, that the Cadmeans were driven out by the Argives and

turned toward the Encheleis. The Gephyraeans, who were left behind, were later driven out by the Boeotians and withdrew to Athens; and they have shrines established at Athens in which the rest of the Athenians have no share, being set apart from the other rites, among them in particular the shrine and mysteries of Achaean Demeter. So much then for the account of Hipparchus's dream and of where the Gephyraeans came from, to whom

the killers of Hipparchus belonged. Now I must go back and take up again the story I set out to tell at the start, of how the Athenians were freed from their tyrants. While Hippias was ruling as tyrant and growing embittered against the Athenians because of Hipparchus's death, the Alcmeonids, who were Athenians by birth and were in exile from the Pisistratids, when their attempt along with the other Athenian exiles to force their return by strength did not succeed, but met with great disaster

in their attempt to return and free Athens—after fortifying Lipsydrium above Paeonia—then the Alcmeonids, contriving every possible scheme against the Pisistratids, took a contract from the Amphictyons to build the temple at Delphi, the one now standing but which did not yet exist then. Being well supplied with money and men of repute from of old, they built the temple more beautiful than the design called for in other

Among other things, although they had contracted to build the temple of porous stone, they had its front finished in Parian marble instead. Now the Athenians say that these men, once established at Delphi, bribed the Pythia with money so that whenever Spartans came to consult the oracle, whether on a private errand or on public business, she would put before them the charge to free Athens. The Lacedaemonians, since the same prophecy kept coming to them again and again, sent

Anchimolius son of Aster, a man of good standing among the citizens, to drive the Pisistratids out of Athens with an army, even though the Pisistratids were their closest guest-friends; for they held the god's business to be of greater weight than the affairs of men. They sent these men by sea in ships. Anchimolius put in at Phalerum and disembarked his army there, but the Pisistratids, forewarned of this, sent to Thessaly for aid,

for an alliance had been made between them. The Thessalians, at their request, by common decision sent a thousand horsemen and their own king, Cineas, a man of Conium. When the Pisistratids had these allies, they devised the following plan: having cleared the plain of Phalerum and made that ground fit for cavalry, they let the horse loose upon the enemy camp. Falling upon it, the cavalry destroyed many others

of the Lacedaemonians, and Anchimolius among them; those of them who survived they penned up in their ships. So the first expedition from Lacedaemon ended in this way, and Anchimolius' grave is in Attica at Alopecae, near the Heracleum in Cynosarges. After this the Lacedaemonians sent out a larger expedition against Athens, appointing King Cleomenes son of Anaxandrides as commander of the army,

no longer sending it by sea but by land. When they invaded Attic territory, the Thessalian cavalry was the first to meet them, and before long it was routed, and more than forty of their men fell; the survivors made off at once, just as they were, straight for Thessaly. Cleomenes reached the city with the Athenians who favored liberty at his side, and there he laid siege to the tyrants, who were shut up

within the Pelasgian wall. And the Lacedaemonians would certainly not have driven out the Pisistratids at all, for they had no intention of making a blockade, and the Pisistratids were well supplied with food and drink, and after besieging them for a few days the Lacedaemonians would have gone back to Sparta. But as it happened, chance turned out badly for the one side and, as it happened, was an ally for the other: for the children

of the Pisistratids, being smuggled out of the country, were captured. When this happened, all their affairs were thrown into confusion, and they surrendered their children back on terms the Athenians wished, so as to leave Attica within five days. After this they withdrew to Sigeum on the Scamander, having ruled the Athenians for thirty-six years, and being themselves originally of Pylos

and of the line of Neleus, descended from the same stock as those around Codrus and Melanthus, who, though originally immigrants, became kings of the Athenians. In memory of this Hippocrates gave his son the same name, calling him Pisistratus after Pisistratus the son of Nestor. In this way the Athenians were rid of their tyrants. But before I tell of the notable things they did or suffered once freed,

before Ionia revolted from Darius and Aristagoras of Miletus came to Athens to ask for their help, I will first relate this. Athens, though great even before, once rid of her tyrants became still greater. In her two men held power: Cleisthenes, a man of the Alcmaeonid family, who is said to have persuaded the Pythia, and Isagoras son of Tisander, of a distinguished household, though

of his more distant origins I cannot speak; his kinsmen sacrifice to Zeus of Caria. These men contended for power, and Cleisthenes, being worsted, took the people into partnership with him. Then he changed the Athenians, who had been organized into four tribes, into ten, doing away with the names taken from the sons of Ion — Geleon, Aegicores, Argades, and Hoples — and finding instead the names of other local heroes, except for Ajax:

him, being a neighbor and ally, though a foreigner, he added. In this, it seems to me, this Cleisthenes was imitating his own mother's father, Cleisthenes the tyrant of Sicyon. For Cleisthenes of Sicyon, when at war with the Argives, first stopped the rhapsodes in Sicyon from competing in recitations of Homer's verses, because the Argives and Argos are celebrated in them throughout; and second, since there was, and still is, in the very

marketplace of the Sicyonians a shrine of Adrastus son of Talaus, Cleisthenes wished to expel him, an Argive, from the land. Going to Delphi, he asked the oracle whether he should expel Adrastus; and the Pythia answered him saying that Adrastus was king of the Sicyonians, but he himself was a stone-thrower. Since the god would not grant this, he went back and thought of a device by which Adrastus himself

would depart. When he thought he had found one, he sent to Thebes in Boeotia saying he wished to bring in Melanippus son of Astacus; and the Thebans gave him leave. Bringing in Melanippus, Cleisthenes assigned him a precinct within the very town hall, setting him up there in its most secure spot. Cleisthenes brought in Melanippus (for this too must be told) because

he was the bitterest enemy of Adrastus, since he had killed both Adrastus' brother Mecisteus and his son-in-law Tydeus. Once he had assigned him the precinct, he took away the sacrifices and festivals from Adrastus and gave them to Melanippus. Now the Sicyonians had been accustomed to honor Adrastus very greatly, for the land had been Polybus', and Adrastus was the son of Polybus' daughter, and Polybus, dying childless, gave

the rule to Adrastus. So among other honors the Sicyonians paid to Adrastus, they especially honored his sufferings with tragic choruses, honoring not Dionysus but Adrastus. Cleisthenes gave the choruses back to Dionysus and the rest of the worship to Melanippus. This is what he did concerning Adrastus. As for the tribes of the Dorians, so that they should not be

the same for the Sicyonians as for the Argives, he changed them to other names. There too he made the greatest mockery of the Sicyonians, for he named the tribes after a pig and a donkey, only changing the endings, except for his own tribe: that one he named after his own rule. These were called the Archelaoi, others the Hyatae, others the Oneatae, and others

the Choereatae. The Sicyonians used these names of the tribes both during Cleisthenes' rule and for sixty years after his death; but afterward, taking counsel together, they changed them to the Hylleis, the Pamphyli, and the Dymanatae, and added a fourth to these, named after Aegialeus son of Adrastus, calling it the Aegialeis. This is what Cleisthenes of Sicyon had done;

but the Athenian Cleisthenes, being the grandson of this man of Sicyon through his mother and bearing the same name after him, it seems to me that he too, looking down on the Ionians so that his people's tribes would not match those of the Ionians, imitated his namesake. For once he had won over the Athenian people, who had before been rejected, entirely to his own side, he renamed the tribes and made

them more numerous than before out of fewer: he made ten tribe-leaders instead of four, and likewise distributed the demes among the tribes in groups of ten; and having won the people over, he was far superior to his rivals. Isagoras, getting the worst of it in his turn, devised the following counter-move: he called in Cleomenes the Lacedaemonian, who had become his guest-friend since the siege of the Pisistratids; and Cleomenes was accused of

visiting Isagoras' wife. At first Cleomenes dispatched a herald to Athens who called for Cleisthenes to be cast out, and along with him a great number of other Athenians, whom he named as men under the curse; he sent this message on the instructions of Isagoras. For the Alcmaeonids and their partisans bore the guilt for that killing, while Isagoras himself had no part in it, nor did his friends. The

accursed men of the Athenians got their name in this way. There was Cylon, an Athenian and an Olympic victor; he aimed at tyranny, and gathering a company of men his own age, he attempted to seize the acropolis, but failing to gain control of it, he sat as a suppliant at the statue of the goddess. The presidents of the naucraries, who then governed Athens, made them rise on the promise of safety short of death; but the killing of them is charged to the Alcmaeonids.

This happened before the time of Pisistratus. When Cleomenes sent to demand the expulsion of Cleisthenes and the accursed, Cleisthenes himself withdrew quietly, but Cleomenes nonetheless came to Athens, not with a large force; and on arriving he drove out as accursed seven hundred Athenian households, which Isagoras had suggested to him. Having done this, he next attempted to dissolve the Council, putting the offices into the hands of three hundred partisans of

Isagoras. But when the Council resisted and refused to obey, Cleomenes and Isagoras and his partisans seized the acropolis. The rest of the Athenians, of one mind, laid siege to them for two days; on the third day, those of them who were Lacedaemonians left the country under truce. And the prophecy was fulfilled for Cleomenes.

For when he went up to the acropolis, intending to take possession of it, he went into the inner sanctuary of the goddess as if to address her; but before he could pass through the doors, the priestess rose from her seat and said, "Stranger of Lacedaemon, turn back and stay out of this shrine, for Dorians are not permitted to enter it." He said, "But woman, I am not

a Dorian, but an Achaean." Paying no heed at all to the omen, he made his attempt, and was then again driven out along with the Lacedaemonians; but the rest the Athenians bound and held for execution, among them Timesitheus the Delphian, whose feats of hand and daring I could relate at great length. These men, then, being bound, met their end. After this the Athenians, Cleisthenes

and the seven hundred households driven out by Cleomenes having been sent for and recalled, sent messengers to Sardis, wishing to make common cause with the Persians, since they knew that war had broken out between the Lacedaemonians and Cleomenes on one side and themselves on the other. When the messengers arrived at Sardis and said what they had been instructed to say, Artaphrenes son of Hystaspes, governor of Sardis, asked who these people were and where in the world they lived, that they wanted to become allies of the Persians; and having learned this,

the sum of what the messengers said on his behalf was this: if the Athenians gave King Darius earth and water, he would make an alliance with them, but if they did not, they were to leave. The messengers, taking it upon themselves, said they would give it, since they wanted the alliance to be made. On returning home they came under grave blame for this. Cleomenes, meanwhile, understanding that he had been badly insulted

in word and deed by the Athenians, gathered an army from the whole Peloponnese, without saying against whom he was gathering it, wanting both to punish the Athenian people and to set up Isagoras as tyrant, for Isagoras had come out with him from the acropolis. So Cleomenes invaded Eleusis with a great force, and the Boeotians, by prearrangement, seized Oenoe and Hysiae, the outlying villages of

Attica, while the Chalcidians for their part came in and ravaged parts of Attica. The Athenians, though caught between two fronts, decided to deal with the Boeotians and Chalcidians later, and drew up their arms against the Peloponnesians who were at Eleusis. But when the armies were about to join battle, the Corinthians were the first to reconsider among themselves that they were not acting justly, and they changed their minds and

withdrew, and after them Demaratus son of Ariston, who was likewise a king of the Spartans and had joined in leading out the army from Lacedaemon, though he had not before been at odds with Cleomenes. Because of this rift, Sparta established a rule barring both kings from accompanying the army together on campaign - for until then both had gone along together - and when one of them was excused from this, the other was to be left behind, and also

one of the sons of Tyndareus; for before this both of them too, being invoked as helpers, had gone along. So then at Eleusis, when the rest of the allies saw that the kings of the Lacedaemonians did not agree and that the Corinthians had abandoned their post, they too went off and departed, this being the fourth time the Dorians had come against Attica, twice invading in war and

twice for the good of the Athenian people: first when they also settled Megara - this expedition may rightly be called the one under Codrus, king of the Athenians; second and third when they came from Sparta to expel the sons of Pisistratus; and fourth, on this occasion, when Cleomenes led the Peloponnesians in and invaded Eleusis. Thus this was the fourth time the Dorians invaded Athens. When this expedition

broke up ingloriously, the Athenians, wanting to take revenge, first made a campaign against the Chalcidians. The Boeotians came to help the Chalcidians at the Euripus. Seeing the Boeotians, the Athenians decided to attack the Boeotians before the Chalcidians. They joined battle with the Boeotians and won decisively, killing very many and taking seven hundred of them alive. On this very same day

the Athenians crossed over to Euboea and engaged the Chalcidians too, and having defeated them as well, they left four thousand settlers on the land of the hippobotai. The hippobotai were what the wealthy men of the Chalcidians were called. As many of these as they took alive they kept in custody bound in fetters along with the Boeotian captives; but in time they released them, setting a ransom of two minae each. The fetters in which

they once were shackled they set hanging upon the acropolis, and the fetters still survived into my own time, hanging from the walls scorched by fire at the hands of the Mede, opposite the chamber that faces west. And they dedicated a tenth of the ransom money, making of it a bronze four-horse chariot; it stands on the left hand as one first enters the propylaea on the acropolis, and on it is inscribed

this: "Having subdued the peoples of the Boeotians and Chalcidians, the sons of the Athenians quenched their insolence in deeds of war, with chains of iron and darkness; from the ransom they set up these horses, a tenth part, for Pallas." So the Athenians grew in power. And it is clear, not in this one instance alone but everywhere, that equality of speech is a serious matter, if indeed the Athenians, while ruled by tyrants, were no better in war than any of

their neighbors, but once freed of tyrants became by far the foremost. This shows that while held down they were deliberately slack, working as for a master, but once liberated each man was eager to achieve for himself. So this is what the Athenians were doing. The Thebans, meanwhile, afterward sent to the god, wanting to take revenge on the Athenians. The Pythia said there was no vengeance to be had from their own resources, but told them to bring the matter before the assembly of many voices and to

ask help of those nearest them. When the envoys had left, they laid the oracle before an assembly. As they heard those present say to ask those nearest, the Thebans, on hearing this, said, "Do not the Tanagraeans and Coroneans and Thespians live nearest us? And these indeed always fight alongside us and eagerly share the burden of war with us. What need is there to ask them? Rather, perhaps

this is not what the oracle means." As they were pondering such things, someone who had understood said, "I think I grasp what the oracle wants to tell us. Asopus is said to have had daughters, Thebe and Aegina; since these are sisters, I think the god means that we should ask the Aeginetans to become our avengers." And since no better opinion appeared than this, they sent at once and asked

the Aeginetans, calling on them by the oracle to help them, as being their nearest kin. They, when asked for aid, said they would send along the Aeacidae with them. When the Thebans, trusting in the alliance of the Aeacidae, made an attempt and were roughly handled by the Athenians, the Thebans sent again and gave the Aeacidae back to them, but asked instead for the men themselves. The Aeginetans, elated by their great prosperity and recalling

an old enmity toward the Athenians, then, at the Thebans' request, waged an undeclared war on the Athenians: for while the Athenians were occupied with the Boeotians, the Aeginetans sailed with warships against Attica and sacked Phalerum and, along the rest of the coast, many villages, and by doing this did great harm to the Athenians. This enmity that the Aeginetans owed the Athenians from before had its origin as follows. For the Epidaurians their

land yielded no crop. Concerning this misfortune the Epidaurians consulted the oracle at Delphi; the Pythia bade them set up statues of Damia and Auxesia, and told them that things would go better for them if they did so. The Epidaurians then asked whether they should make the statues of bronze or of stone; the Pythia allowed neither of these, but said they should be made of the wood of the cultivated olive. So the Epidaurians asked

the Athenians to give them an olive tree to cut, considering the Athenian olives to be the most sacred. It is said, too, that at that time there were no olive trees anywhere else in the world except at Athens. The Athenians said they would give it on these terms: that the Epidaurians should bring yearly offerings to Athena Polias and to Erechtheus. The Epidaurians agreed to this and got what they asked for,

and having made statues from these olive trees they set them up; and their land bore crops, and they fulfilled toward the Athenians what they had agreed. Up to this time, and even before it, the Aeginetans were subject to the Epidaurians in other respects and also crossed over to Epidaurus for their lawsuits, giving and receiving judgment from one another there. But from this point on they built ships and,

acting willfully, revolted from the Epidaurians. Being now at odds with them, and being masters of the sea, they harassed them, and indeed they carried off these very statues of Damia and Auxesia from them, and brought them and set them up in their own territory, in the interior, in a place called Oea, about twenty stadia

from the city. Having set them up in this place, they propitiated them with sacrifices and with women's choruses full of mockery, ten men being appointed as chorus-leaders for each of the two deities; and the choruses spoke ill of no man, but only of the local women. The Epidaurians too had the same sacred rites; and they have secret rites as well. When these statues were stolen, the Epidaurians

stopped fulfilling toward the Athenians what they had agreed. The Athenians sent in anger to the Epidaurians; but they replied that they were doing no wrong: for as long as they had had the statues in their land, they had fulfilled what they had agreed, but now that the statues had been taken from them, it was no longer fair for them to keep paying, but they told the Athenians to demand payment from the Aeginetans who now held them. In response to this the Athenians sent to Aegina

and demanded the statues back; but the Aeginetans said they had no dealings whatsoever with the Athenians. The Athenians say that after this demand a single trireme was sent out carrying certain of their citizens, who, being sent on behalf of the state and arriving at Aegina, tried to tear these statues, as being made of their own wood, up out of their bases, so as to carry them off. Not being able

to overpower them in this way, they threw ropes around them and tried to drag the statues off, and as they were dragging them, a thunderclap occurred, and along with the thunderclap an earthquake; and the sailors of the trireme who were hauling on the ropes, affected by this, lost their senses, and in this state killed one another as though they were enemies, until at last only one was left of them all and he made his way back to Phalerum. This is how the Athenians say it happened, but the Aeginetans say the Athenians did not come in a single

ship: for a single ship, or a small number beyond that, they could have driven off without difficulty, even lacking ships of their own; but they say a great many ships sailed against their land, and that they themselves gave way and avoided a naval engagement. On this point they cannot say for certain whether it was because they recognized themselves inferior in a sea fight that they gave way on this account, or because they wished to do

something like what they in fact did. As for the Athenians, when no one came out to fight them, they say they disembarked from their ships and turned to the statues, and being unable to tear them up out of their bases, they thereupon threw ropes around them and dragged them, until, as they were being dragged, both statues did the same thing - though to me this seems incredible, even if to someone else it may not: for they fell upon their knees

to fall, and that ever since that time he had remained in this condition. That is what the Athenians say happened. But the Aeginetans say that when the Athenians learned that they were about to campaign against them, they made the Argives ready to help. So when the Athenians had landed on Aegina, the Argives came to their aid, having crossed over from Epidaurus to the island without being noticed, and before the Athenians had any warning

they fell upon them, cutting them off from their ships; and at that same moment there came a thunderclap and an earthquake upon them. This, then, is what is said by the Argives and the Aeginetans, and it is agreed even by the Athenians that only one of their men got back safely to Attica. Except that the Argives say it was because the Argives destroyed the Attic force that this one man

survived, while the Athenians say it was through divine action; yet not even this one man survived, they say, but perished in the following manner. Once he was brought back to Athens he reported the disaster; and when the wives of the men who had campaigned against Aegina learned of it, they were furious that he alone of all the men should have been saved, and surrounding the man they stabbed him with the pins of their garments, each of them asking him where

her own husband was. And so this man was killed in this way, and to the Athenians the deed of the women seemed to be a thing even more terrible than the disaster itself. Not having any other way to punish the women, they changed their dress to the Ionian style; for before this the women of Athens had worn Dorian dress, very similar to that of Corinth. So they changed it

to the linen tunic, so that they would have no need of pins. In truth, if one is speaking accurately, this dress was not originally Ionian but Carian, since all the ancient Greek dress for women was the same as what we now call Dorian. As for the Argives and the Aeginetans, in addition to this they also made it a law among

themselves in each case that their pins should be made half again as long as the measure then in use, and that women should dedicate pins above all else in the temple of these goddesses, and that nothing of Attic manufacture should be brought to the temple, not even pottery, but that henceforth it should be the custom there to drink from local vessels only. And so from that time to this day the women of Argos and Aegina, on account of this quarrel with

the Athenians, have worn pins larger than before. This was the beginning of the hostility toward the Aeginetans arising from the Athenians, as has been described. Now, when the Thebans made their appeal, remembering eagerly the affair of the statues, the Aeginetans came to the aid of the Boeotians. The Aeginetans ravaged the coastal parts of Attica, and when the Athenians set out to campaign against Aegina

an oracle came from Delphi telling them to hold off from retaliation against the Aeginetans' wrongdoing for thirty years, and in the thirty-first year, having dedicated a precinct to Aeacus, to begin the war against the Aeginetans, and things would go as they wished; but if they campaigned at once, they would suffer much and do much in the meantime, but in the end would subdue them. When the Athenians heard this report brought back,

they dedicated the precinct to Aeacus which now stands on the agora, but they could not endure hearing that they must wait thirty years, having suffered such outrageous treatment from the Aeginetans. But while they were preparing for revenge, a matter arising from the Lacedaemonians became an obstacle. For the Lacedaemonians, learning of the scheme devised by the Alcmaeonids against the Pythia, and what the Pythia had contrived against themselves

and the Pisistratids, felt it a double misfortune: that they had driven out men who were their guest-friends from that man's land, and that after doing this they received no gratitude from the Athenians. Moreover, beyond this, the oracles urged them on, declaring that many hostile things would come to them from the Athenians—oracles of which they had previously been ignorant, but which they had now learned in full, since Cleomenes had brought them to Sparta. Cleomenes had

acquired these oracles from the Athenian acropolis, which the Pisistratids had previously possessed, but had abandoned in the shrine when driven into exile, and Cleomenes recovered what had been left behind. So then, when the Lacedaemonians had recovered the oracles and saw the Athenians growing in power and by no means willing to obey them, they reasoned that the Attic people, if free,

would become a match for their own power, but that if held down under tyranny, it would be weak and ready to be ruled. Having grasped each of these points, they sent for Hippias son of Pisistratus from Sigeum on the Hellespont, where the Pisistratids had taken refuge. When Hippias came at their summons, the Spartans, having also summoned messengers from their other allies, spoke to them as follows: "Allied men, we acknowledge that we ourselves did not act rightly:

stirred up by counterfeit oracles, we drove out men who were our closest guest-friends and who had undertaken to deliver Athens into our hands—we drove them from their homeland, and then, having done this, we handed the city over to an ungrateful people, who, once freed through us and having lifted up its head, drove us out along with our king in the most insolent manner, and having grown a reputation, now increases in power, so that the neighboring peoples, above all the

Boeotians and Chalcidians, have learned this to their cost, and perhaps someone else too will learn it by making the same mistake. Since we erred in doing what we did, we shall now try, coming together with you, to take revenge upon them; for this very reason we have summoned this man Hippias, and you from your cities, so that with a common plan and a common expedition we may bring him into Athens and restore to him what we took away." So they spoke,

but the majority of the allies were unwilling to accept these words. Most of them kept silent, but Socles of Corinth spoke as follows. Socles, speaking as ambassador from Corinth, said these things, and Hippias answered him, calling upon the same gods as Socles had, saying that indeed the Corinthians of all people would most long for the Pisistratids, whenever their appointed days came for them to be vexed by the Athenians. Hippias answered in this way,

as one who knew the oracles most accurately of all men; but the rest of the allies, who up to that point had kept themselves quiet, once they heard Socles speak freely, each of them broke silence and took the side of the Corinthian's opinion, and they charged the Lacedaemonians solemnly to do nothing new against a Greek city. Thus this matter was stopped. And as Hippias was driven away from there,

Amyntas king of the Macedonians offered him Anthemus, and the Thessalians offered him Iolcus. But he chose neither of these, and withdrew instead back to Sigeum, which Pisistratus had taken by the spear from the Mytilenians, and having gained control of it had established as tyrant there his own bastard son Hegesistratus, born of an Argive woman, who did not hold without a fight what he had received from Pisistratus. For the Mytilenians and the Athenians made war for a long time,

the former setting out from the city of Achilleum and the latter from Sigeum, the Mytilenians demanding the return of the territory, while the Athenians neither conceded the point nor accepted it, arguing by reasoning that the Aeolians had no more claim to the territory of the Iliad than they themselves and all the other Greeks who had joined with Menelaus in avenging the abduction of Helen. As they made war, all sorts of other things happened in their battles, and in one of these

the poet Alcaeus, when a battle took place and the Athenians were winning, himself fled and escaped, but the Athenians took his arms and hung them up in the temple of Athena at Sigeum. Alcaeus composed a poem about this and sent it to Mytilene, announcing his own misfortune to his comrade Melanippus. Periander son of Cypselus reconciled the Mytilenians and the Athenians; for to him

they submitted the matter as arbiter. He reconciled them in this way: that each side should keep what it then held. Thus Sigeum came under the Athenians. Now when Hippias arrived in Asia from Lacedaemon, he set every wheel in motion, slandering the Athenians to Artaphrenes and doing everything he could so that Athens might come under his own power and that of Darius. Hippias was carrying out these plans, and the

Athenians, learning of this, sent messengers to Sardis, urging the Persians not to trust the Athenian exiles. Artaphrenes told them that, if they wished to be safe, they should take Hippias back. Now the Athenians would not accept these words as reported; and having refused them, they resolved to be openly at war with the Persians. It was while they held this view, having already fallen under suspicion with the Persians,

that at this very time Aristagoras of Miletus, having been driven out of Sparta by Cleomenes the Lacedaemonian, arrived at Athens; for this city held the greatest power of the rest. Coming before the assembly, Aristagoras said the same things he had said at Sparta about the good things to be found in Asia and about the war with Persia, how the Persians

had no use of shield or spear and would be easy to conquer. This is what he said, and in addition to this he also said that the Milesians were colonists of the Athenians, and that it was fitting that the Athenians, being powerful, should rescue them; and there was nothing he did not promise, in his great need, until he persuaded them. It seems that deceiving a crowd is simpler than deceiving one man, since

he was unable to deceive Cleomenes the Lacedaemonian alone, yet he managed to do this to thirty thousand Athenians. So the Athenians, persuaded, voted to send twenty ships to help the Ionians, appointing as their commander Melanthius, a citizen held in the highest regard in every respect. These ships were the beginning of troubles for both Greeks and barbarians. Aristagoras sailed on ahead and arrived at Miletus, and having devised

a plan from which no benefit at all was going to come to the Ionians—nor indeed did he do it for their sake, but only in order to trouble King Darius—he sent a man into Phrygia to the Paeonians, who had been taken captive by Megabazus from the river Strymon and were living in Phrygia in a district and village of their own. When this man arrived among the Paeonians, he said the following: "Men

"Paeonians, Aristagoras the tyrant of Miletus has sent me to advise you of a way to safety, if indeed you are willing to follow it. All Ionia has now revolted from the King, and it is open to you to save yourselves and return to your own land. As far as the sea, the matter is yours to manage; from there on it will be our concern." Hearing this, the Paeonians were very glad, and taking their children and wives

they fled toward the sea, though some of them stayed behind out of fear. When the Paeonians reached the sea, they crossed from there to Chios. While they were already on Chios, a large force of Persian cavalry had come on their heels, pursuing them. When it failed to overtake them, it sent word to Chios demanding that the Paeonians be sent back. But the Paeonians

would not agree to this; instead, the Chians carried them from Chios over to Lesbos, and from there the Lesbians took them on to Doriscus, from where they made their way on foot and arrived in Paeonia. As for Aristagoras, once twenty Athenian ships had reached him, bringing along five triremes of Eretrians, who campaigned not as a favor to the Athenians but to the Milesians themselves, repaying a debt they owed them—for the Milesians earlier

had shared with the Eretrians in the war against the Chalcidians, at the time when the Samians had come to the aid of the Chalcidians against the Eretrians and Milesians—once these allies had arrived along with the rest of the allied force, Aristagoras organized an expedition against Sardis. He himself did not join the campaign but remained in Miletus, appointing other men as commanders of the Milesians, his own brother Charopinus and, of

the citizens, another man, Hermophantus. Arriving with this expedition, the Ionians came to Ephesus, where they left their ships at Coressus in Ephesian territory, and themselves went up inland with a large force, taking the Ephesians as guides for the way. Traveling along the river Cayster, from there, once they had crossed Mount Tmolus, they arrived and took Sardis, with no one opposing them; they took everything except the acropolis, and the acropolis was defended

by Artaphrenes himself, who had no small force of men. What kept them from plundering the city once they had taken it was this. In Sardis most of the houses were built of reeds, and even those that were of brick had roofs of reed thatch; when one of the soldiers set fire to one of these, the fire spread at once from house to house across the whole city.

As the city burned, the Lydians and every Persian who was in it, cut off on every side as the fire consumed the outskirts and finding no way out of the city, gathered together in the marketplace and by the river Pactolus, which carries gold dust down from Tmolus and flows through the middle of the marketplace and then

empties into the river Hermus, and the Hermus into the sea; gathering along this Pactolus and in the marketplace, the Lydians and Persians were forced to defend themselves. When the Ionians saw some of the enemy resisting and others advancing against them in great numbers, they grew afraid and withdrew to the mountain called Tmolus, and from there, under cover of night, they made their way

back to their ships. And so Sardis was burned, and in it a temple of the native goddess Cybebe, which the Persians later used as their pretext for burning down the temples in Greece in return. At that time the Persians who held the territories on this side of the river Halys, hearing of these events, gathered together and came to the aid of the Lydians. And when they found that the Ionians were no longer at Sardis, they followed their track

and caught up with them at Ephesus. The Ionians drew up against them, but when battle was joined they were badly defeated. The Persians killed many of them, including men of note, among them Eualcides, commander of the Eretrians, who had won crowns in the games and had been much praised by Simonides of Ceos; those of them who escaped the battle scattered to their several cities. Such was the outcome

of that engagement. Afterward the Athenians abandoned the Ionians entirely; though Aristagoras appealed to them repeatedly through messengers, they refused to help them further. Deprived of Athenian alliance, the Ionians—since matters already stood as they did with regard to Darius—nonetheless prepared no less vigorously for the war against the King. Sailing to the Hellespont, they brought Byzantium and all the other cities in that region

under their own control, and having sailed out beyond the Hellespont they won over most of Caria as an ally as well; for Caunus too, which had earlier been unwilling to join the alliance, joined them after the burning of Sardis. The Cypriots all joined them of their own accord, except for the Amathusians; for they too had revolted from the Medes in this way. Onesilus, brother of Gorgus king of the Salaminians

and younger than he, was the son of Chersis, son of Siromus, son of Euelthon. This man had often before urged Gorgus to revolt from the King, and now, when he learned that the Ionians too had revolted, he pressed him all the more insistently; but when he could not persuade Gorgus, Onesilus and his own partisans watched for him to leave the city of the Salaminians and shut him out of the gates. Gorgus,

deprived of his city, fled to the Medes, and Onesilus took power in Salamis and tried to persuade all the Cypriots to join the revolt with him. He persuaded all the rest, but the Amathusians were unwilling to obey him, and so he laid siege to them, encamping before their city. Onesilus, then, was besieging Amathus. When word was brought to King Darius that Sardis had been taken and burned by the Athenians and Ionians, and that the man who had led the gathering that

had brought this about was Aristagoras of Miletus, it is said that at first, on learning this, he took no account of the Ionians at all, well knowing that they at least would not go unpunished for their revolt, but asked who the Athenians were; and having learned this, he called for his bow, took it, set an arrow to it, and shot it up toward the sky, and as he shot it into the air he said, "O Zeus,

grant that it fall to me to make the Athenians pay." Having said this, he ordered one of his attendants to say to him three times every time his dinner was set before him, "Master, remember the Athenians." Having given this order, he then summoned into his presence Histiaeus of Miletus, whom Darius had by now been keeping at his court for a long time, and said, "I hear, Histiaeus, that your deputy, to whom you entrusted Miletus, has done me a mischief. For men

whom he brought over from the other continent, and Ionians along with them who will pay me the penalty for what they have done—these he has persuaded to follow along with those others, and he has robbed me of Sardis. Now then, how does this seem to you to be a good thing? And how was any of this done without your own counsel? Take care that you do not later find yourself held to blame." To this Histiaeus replied, "King,

what a thing you have said, that I should have devised a plan from which any trouble, great or small, was likely to come upon you! What could I gain by seeking to do this, being in want of nothing? I have everything that you yourself have, and I am deemed worthy to be privy to all your counsels. But if my deputy is indeed doing anything such as you describe, be assured

that he has done it entirely on his own account. For my part, I do not even accept the report at all, that the Milesians and my deputy are stirring up any trouble against your affairs. But if indeed they are doing something of the kind, and you, O King, have heard of it as it truly is, then understand what a thing you have done in dragging me away from the sea. For it seems the Ionians, once I was out of their sight,

have done what they had long desired to do; whereas had I been in Ionia, no city would have stirred. Now then, send me as quickly as possible to Ionia, so that I may set all these matters right again for you and deliver into your hands this deputy of Miletus who has contrived all this. And when I have done this according to your wish, I swear by the gods of the King's house that I will not

take off the tunic I am wearing until I go down to Ionia and make Sardo, the greatest of islands, pay tribute to you." By saying this Histiaeus meant to deceive him, but Darius believed him and let him go, charging him, once he had fulfilled what he had promised, to come back to him at Susa. Meanwhile the report about Sardis was making its way up to the King, and while Darius,

dealt with the matter of the bow, was in conversation with Histiaeus, and Histiaeus, released by Darius, was making his way to the sea—during all this time the following was happening. As Onesilus of Salamis was besieging Amathus, word was brought to him that Artybius, a Persian, was expected to arrive in Cyprus bringing a large Persian force by ship; on learning this, Onesilus sent heralds through Ionia calling on them for help, and the Ionians

after brief deliberation came with a large fleet. The Ionians duly arrived in Cyprus, and the Persians, having crossed by ship from Cilicia, marched against Salamis by land, while the Phoenicians with their ships sailed around the headland of Cyprus called the Keys. This being so, the tyrants of Cyprus, calling together the commanders of the Ionians, said to them,

"Men of Ionia, we Cypriots give you the choice which of the two you wish to engage, the Persians or the Phoenicians. If you wish to be drawn up on land to try your strength against the Persians, now is the time to leave your ships and take up positions on land, while we board your ships to contend against the Phoenicians; but if you would rather try your strength against the Phoenicians, you must do

whichever of these you choose, so that, as far as it lies with you, both Ionia and Cyprus may be free." To this the Ionians replied, "It was the common council of the Ionians that sent us to guard the sea, not so that we should hand our ships over to the Cypriots and ourselves engage the Persians on land. We, then, will try to prove ourselves worthy in the position to which we were assigned; as for you, you must remember

"...what you suffered as slaves under the Medes, to become good men." This is how the Ionians answered them. Afterward, once the Persians had reached the plain of Salamis, the Cyprian kings arrayed their forces, arraying the rest of the Cyprians opposite the rest of the enemy's soldiers, but selecting the best of the Salaminians and Solians they arrayed them against the Persians; and against Artybius, the general of the Persians, Onesilus arrayed himself as a volunteer.

Artybius rode a horse trained to stand on its hind legs and attack a hoplite. Onesilus, learning of this—for he had a shield-bearer who was Carian by birth, very distinguished in war and otherwise full of spirit—said to him: "I hear that Artybius's horse rears up and strikes with both feet and mouth against whomever it is brought against. So consider and tell me at once which of the two

you wish to watch for and strike, the horse or Artybius himself." His attendant answered him thus: "My king, either task suits me, both together or just one, whatever you order I am ready for it; but I will tell you what seems to me more fitting to your position. I say that a king and a general ought to engage

a king and a general. For if you bring down the general, that is a great thing for you; and second, if he brings you down—may it not happen—being killed by a worthy man is half a misfortune; while it is fitting for us attendants to engage other attendants, and the horse as well. As for its tricks, have no fear at all; for I promise you it will never again rear up against any man." Having said this,

immediately the armies engaged, both by land and by sea. By sea the Ionians proved themselves supreme that day and overcame the Phoenicians, and among them the Samians distinguished themselves most; by land, when the armies met, they fell upon each other and fought. As for the two generals, this is what happened: as Artybius, mounted on his horse, bore down upon Onesilus, Onesilus, according to what he had agreed

with his shield-bearer, struck at Artybius himself as he came on; and when the horse set its feet upon Onesilus's shield, the Carian struck with his sickle and lopped off the horse's feet. So Artybius, the general of the Persians, fell there together with his horse. While the others too were fighting, Stesenor, who was tyrant of Curium, betrayed his side, having with him no small

force of men. These Curians are said to be colonists of the Argives. When the Curians had betrayed them, at once the war-chariots of the Salaminians did the same as the Curians had done. When this happened, the Persians got the upper hand over the Cyprians. When the army was routed, many others fell, and among them Onesilus son of Chersis, the man responsible for stirring up the Cyprian revolt, and

Aristocyprus son of Philocyprus, king of the Solians—this Philocyprus was praised in verse above all other tyrants by Solon the Athenian, during his visit to Cyprus. As for Onesilus, the Amathusians, because he had besieged them, cut off his head and carried it to Amathus and hung it up above the gates; and when the head, now hollow, had been hanging there, a swarm of bees entered it and filled it

with honeycomb. When this had happened, the Amathusians, since they consulted an oracle about the head, were told to take it down and bury it, and to sacrifice to Onesilus every year as to a hero, and that if they did this, things would go better for them. So the Amathusians did this down to my own time. As for the Ionians who had fought at sea off Cyprus, when they learned that Onesilus's cause had been destroyed and

that the cities of the Cyprians were all under siege except Salamis, and that the Salaminians had handed that one over to Gorgus, their former king, the Ionians, learning this at once, sailed away back to Ionia. Of the cities in Cyprus, the one that held out longest under siege was Soli; digging tunnels under the surrounding wall, the Persians captured it in its fifth month. So the Cyprians, having been free for one year,

were once again enslaved. Daurises, husband to one of Darius's daughters, along with Hymaees and Otanes, other Persian generals also married to daughters of Darius, pursued those of the Ionians who had marched against Sardis and drove them back onto their ships, and having thus prevailed in the battle, from then on they divided up the cities among themselves and sacked them. Daurises turned toward the cities on the Hellespont and took Dardanus; he took

Abydos too, and Percote, and Lampsacus, and Paesus. These he captured one on each day; but as he was marching from Paesus against the city of Parium, news came to him that the Carians, of the same mind as the Ionians, had revolted from the Persians. So he turned back from the Hellespont and led his army against Caria. Somehow this was reported to the Carians before Daurises arrived;

and when the Carians learned of it, they gathered at the place called the White Pillars, near the river Marsyas—a stream that rises in the region of Idrias and pours into the Maeander. When the Carians had assembled there, many plans were proposed, but the best one, in my opinion, was that of Pixodarus son of Mausolus, a man of Cindye, who had married the daughter of Syennesis, king of the Cilicians. This man's

proposal was that the Carians should cross the Maeander and fight with the river at their backs, so that the Carians, having no way to retreat, would be forced to stand their ground and thus become even braver than their nature. But this proposal did not prevail; instead they decided that the Maeander should be at the Persians' backs rather than their own, evidently so that if the Persians were put to flight

and defeated in the battle, they would not be able to escape home, but would fall into the river. Afterward, when the Persians had arrived and crossed the Maeander, there on the river Marsyas the Carians engaged the Persians and fought a fierce battle for a long time; but in the end they were defeated by sheer numbers. Of the Persians about two thousand men fell, of the Carians about ten thousand.

Those of them who escaped from there were driven together into Labraunda, into the sanctuary of Zeus Stratius, a great and holy grove of plane trees. The Carians are the only people we know of who offer sacrifices to Zeus Stratius. Having been driven together there, they deliberated about their safety, whether it would be better for them to surrender themselves to the Persians or to abandon Asia altogether. While they were deliberating

on this, the Milesians and their allies arrived to help them; then the Carians abandoned the plans they had been considering before, and instead prepared to make war again from the beginning. When the Persians advanced they engaged them, and in the fighting they were defeated even more badly than before; and of all who fell, the Milesians suffered the heaviest losses. After this defeat, however,

the Carians recovered and fought back. For learning that the Persians had set out to march against their cities, they set an ambush along the road near Pedasus, and the Persians, falling into it at night, were destroyed, both the soldiers themselves and their generals Daurises, Amorges, and Sisimaces; along with them died Myrsus son of Gyges as well. The leader of this ambush was Heraclides son of Ibanollis, a man of Mylasa. These

were the Persians destroyed in this way. As for Hymaees, he too had been among those pursuing the Ionians who had marched against Sardis, and turning toward the Propontis he took Cius in Mysia; and having taken this, when he learned that Daurises had abandoned the Hellespont to march on Caria, he in turn abandoned the Propontis, marched his army toward the Hellespont, and took all the Aeolians who occupy

the Troad, and he took the Gergithians, the remnant of the ancient Teucrians. But Hymaees himself, while capturing these peoples, died of disease in the Troad. Thus he met his end. Meanwhile Artaphrenes, the governor of Sardis, and Otanes, the third general, were appointed to make war against Ionia and the neighboring Aeolis. In Ionia they took Clazomenae, and among the Aeolians, Cyme. As the cities were being taken,

Aristagoras of Miletus proved, as it turned out, to be a man of no great spirit; for having thrown Ionia into turmoil and stirred up great troubles, he began, seeing how things stood, to plan flight; moreover it seemed to him impossible to overcome King Darius. In view of this, he called together his fellow conspirators and took counsel, saying it would be better for them to have some place of refuge ready, in case they should be driven out of

Miletus, whether he should lead them from there to Sardo to found a colony, or to Myrcinus of the Edonians, which Histiaeus had fortified after receiving it as a gift from Darius. This is what Aristagoras asked. Hecataeus son of Hegesander, a writer of accounts, advised that they should go to neither of these places, but should build a fortress on the island of Leros and remain quiet there, if

they were driven out of Miletus; and afterward, setting out from there, they could return to Miletus. This is what Hecataeus advised, but Aristagoras himself was most inclined to lead them off to Myrcinus. So he entrusted Miletus to Pythagoras, a man of good standing among the citizens, and he himself, taking with him whoever wished to go, sailed to Thrace, and took possession of the region for which

he had set out; but setting out from there, Aristagoras himself and his army were destroyed by the Thracians, while he was besieging a city, even though the Thracians were willing to come out under a truce.

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