Part 4

Half a century later, when the Ionians revolted against the Persian rule, they chose for their admiral a Phokaian called Dionysios. Later they regretted their choice, considering Dionysios to be altogether too much of a disciplinarian, and would no longer take his orders. Disunion broke out among them, and they were entirely defeated at the Battle of Ladê. What did Dionysios do? He captured three of the enemy’s vessels, and then, to elude pursuit, sailed into the Levant, where he sank a number of trading-barks and collected a great treasure. Then he made for Sicily, where he “set up as a buccaneer,” sparing Greek ships of course, but attacking Etruscans and Carthaginians. I suppose it _was_ piracy, but at least it was Drake’s sort, not Captain Kidd’s. We may hope he came to a good end.

There was a contemporary of Dionysios who is an even more significant figure for our understanding of Hellenism. This is Demokêdês of Kroton. The political background of the story of Demokêdês, as it is told by Herodotus, does not quite harmonize with the rest of his history, for it implies a policy towards Greece which Persia did not adopt till later. But otherwise there is no reason to doubt that things happened much as Herodotus says. Demokêdês was born at Kroton in the extreme south of Italy. It is a town famous in the history of medicine. We do not know how the medical school there originated. The earliest seems to have been in the Aegean island of Kos in connexion with the worship of Asklepios (Aesculapius), the God of Healing. Whether the physicians of Kroton had an independent tradition or not, they soon became famous. The first great name is Demokêdês. That he had a teacher we know from his words to Darius, but he has not mentioned his teacher’s name. The fact is that Demokêdês was the first doctor whose personality refused to be merged in the guild to which he doubtless belonged. At Kos the guild was so powerful (it had a semi-religious character there) that it was not until the Peloponnesian War that the world heard the personal name of one of its members—Hippokratês. Thus Demokêdês corresponds to Archilochus. I am about to tell again the story of a man of genius.

_At Kroton he was always quarrelling with his father, who had a violent temper. When he could not stand him any longer, he left him and went to Aegina. Settling down there, he in his first year proved his superiority to all the other doctors, although he lacked an outfit and had none of the instruments of his art. And in his second year the Aeginetans hired him for a talent paid by the State, in the third year the Athenian people hired him for a hundred silver pounds, and in the fourth year Polykratês_—tyrant of Samos—_for two talents_.

The instant recognition of Demokêdês is not only an indication of his genius, it shows a remarkable degree of enlightenment on the part of contemporary Greek governments. More credit belongs, no doubt, to the Aeginetans and Athenians than to Polykratês, who evidently retained the services of Demokêdês for the court at Samos. Yet Polykratês too was enlightened. Under his absolute rule or “tyranny,” which is the Greek technical term, the Ionian island of Samos had become the most splendid state in Greece. _Not counting those who became tyrants of the Syracusans, there is none of all the other Greek tyrants who is fit to be compared to Polykratês in magnificence_. This position was won by sea-power. _Polykratês is the first of those Greeks we know who aimed at the Thalassocracy_ (the command of the sea) _save Minos the Knossian and any one else who acquired the rule of the sea before Minos_—an interesting remark in view of the theory that the Ionians definitely aimed at reconstituting the maritime empire of prehistoric Crete. This glittering tyrant suffered at last a reversal of fortune so strange and complete that it became a proverbial instance of the hand of God in human affairs. He was enticed to the Asiatic continent opposite his island by the Persian grandee Oroitês, and there treacherously seized and with nameless tortures put to death. His _entourage_ became the slaves of Oroitês. One of them was Demokêdês.

Some years afterwards King Darius, who had in the meanwhile succeeded to the throne, was flung from his horse while hunting and dislocated his ankle. He entrusted his injury to the court-physicians at Susa, who were Egyptians, Egypt being the home of a very ancient body of medical lore transmitted from father to son. But the Egyptian doctors _by wrenching and forcing the foot made the evil greater. For days seven and seven nights Darius was possessed by sleeplessness by reason of the malady which beset him, but on the eighth day, when the King was in poor case, one who had caught a report in Sardis before he came to Susa of the skill of Demokêdês of Kroton made report to Darius; and he commanded that he be brought before him with all speed. And when they had discovered him among the slaves of Oroitês in some neglected corner, they brought him into the presence dragging his fetters and clothed in rags. And as he stood there Darius asked him if he understood the art; but he would not admit it, fearing that, if he discovered himself, he would lose Hellas altogether. But Darius perceived clearly that he understood the art, but was feigning, and he commanded the men who had brought him to bring forth pricks and goads. Then indeed Demokêdês discovers himself, saying that he had no accurate knowledge of the matter, but having been the disciple of a leech he had some poor knowledge of that skill. Afterwards when he had entrusted himself to him, by using Greek remedies and applying mild cures after the violent he caused him to get sleep, and in short space restored him to sound health, that no longer hoped to have his foot whole again. For a gift thereafter Darius bestows on him two pairs of golden fetters; but Demokêdês asked him if he thus doubled his misfortunes for a gift, just because he had made him whole. Darius was pleased at the speech and sends him to his wives. And the eunuchs who led him there said to the women that this was the man who had given back his life to the King. And each of them, plunging a cup in the chest of gold, gave Demokêdês so rich a gift that his servant, whose name was Skiton, following him gathered up the nobles that fell from the cups, and a great deal of gold was amassed by him._

_Then Demokêdês having healed Darius had a very great house at Susa, and sat at table with the King, and had all else save one thing only, namely his return to the Greeks. And the Egyptian physicians, who formerly tended the King, when they were about to be impaled on the stake for that they had been overcome by a Greek physician, he both saved by his prayers to the King, and also rescued a prophet of Elis, who had followed Polykratês, and was neglected among the slaves. And Demokêdês was a very great matter with the King._

Herodotus is so interesting that it is almost inexcusable to interrupt him; but the essayist has to study brevity. I will therefore in the main summarize what follows, indulging myself in only one remark (which has probably already occurred to my reader) that of course the story has passed through the popular imagination, and that the historian has to admire, not so much the caprice of destiny, as the genius of an indomitable personality.

Shortly after the accident to Darius, his queen Atossa was afflicted by an ulcer on her breast. Atossa was an unspeakably great lady. She was the daughter of Cyrus the Great, the founder of the Persian Empire. She had been the wife of the son and successor of Cyrus, her brother Cambyses. Now she was the wife of Darius and the mother of Xerxes. Darius himself may well have been a little in awe of her. She outlived him, if we may believe Aeschylus, who has introduced her into his play of _The Persians_, uttering magnificent stately lamentations over the ruin of the Persian cause in Hellas, and evoking from his royal tomb the ghost of the “god” Darius. Such was the half-divine woman, who was to help Demokêdês back to the Greece for which he felt so deep a nostalgia. A single touch of Herodotus makes her as real as any patient you have seen in a hospital. _So long as the thing was comparatively little she concealed it and being ashamed of it did not tell anybody, but when she was seriously ill she sent for Demokêdês._ He cured her after extracting a promise, which she fulfilled in the following manner. She persuaded Darius to plan an expedition against Greece and, as an aid to this, to send Demokêdês to make a report on his native country. The King then summoned fifteen Persians of distinction and instructed them to accompany Demokêdês on the projected voyage along the coasts of Hellas in quest of intelligence, commanding them on no account to let Demokêdês escape. Next he sent for his healer and explained the nature of the employment to which he designed to put him. He bade Demokêdês take all his movable possessions with him as presents for his father and his brethren, promising to requite him many times over. Demokêdês declined this offer, that he might not betray himself by too manifest an eagerness. He did accept the gift of a merchant-vessel freighted with “goods of every sort” for his “brethren”—and for his father too, we may hope, that irascible old man.

The expedition went first to Sidon, where they fitted out two triremes and the merchant-vessel freighted with goods of every sort, then sailed for Greece. They touched at various points of the coast, spying out the land and writing down an account of what seemed most remarkable. In this way they came at last to Tarentum in Italy. There Demokêdês got in touch with Aristophilidês, whom Herodotus calls the “king” of the Tarentines. Aristophilidês removed the steering-apparatus of the foreign ships, which prevented their sailing, and imprisoned the crew as spies; while Demokêdês took advantage of their predicament to escape to his native Kroton. Then Aristophilidês released the Persians and gave them back their rudders. They at once sailed in pursuit of their prisoner, and found him at Kroton “holding the attention of the Agora,” which was the centre of Greek city-life. There they _sought to lay hands on him. And some of the men of Kroton, fearing the might of Persia, would have yielded him up, but others gat hold of him on their part, and began to beat the Persians with their staves; who made profession in such words as these: “Ye men of Kroton, consider what ye do; ye are taking from us a man that is a runaway slave of the King. How then shall King Darius be content to have received this insult? And how shall your deeds serve you well, if ye drive us away? Against what city shall we march before this, and what city shall we try to enslave before yours?” So spake they, but they did not indeed persuade the men of Kroton, but had Demokêdês rescued out of their hands, and the merchantman, which they had brought with them, taken away from them, and so sailed back to Asia; neither did they seek any further knowledge concerning Greece, though this was the object of their coming; for they had lost their guide. Now as they were putting forth, Demokêdês charged them with no message but this, bidding them tell Darius “Demokêdês is married to Milo’s daughter.” For the name of Milo the wrestler was of great account with the King. I think that Demokêdês hurried on this marriage, paying a great sum, in order that Darius might see clearly that in his own country also Demokêdês was a great man._

The explanation of Herodotus is convincing. Demokêdês was suffering from repressed egotism. He had had wealth and consideration in Persia, but he could not breathe its spiritual atmosphere. It is pleasant to reflect that in the court of Susa he may have regretted his father. To the Hellenic mind it was a chief curse in Barbarism that it swamps the individual. How shall a man possess his soul in a land where the slavery of all but One is felt to be a _natural_ state of things? So in ancient Greece it was above all else personality that counted; freedom was a merely external matter unless it meant the liberation of the spirit, the development (as our jargon expresses it) of personality—although this development realized itself most effectively in the service of the State. Greek history is starred with brilliant idiosyncrasies—Demokêdês being one, whom we may now leave triumphant there at home in his flaming Persian robe, “holding the attention of the Agora” with his amazing story.

It would be too strange an omission to say nothing about that which, before Alexander’s tremendous march, is the most familiar of all Greek adventures among the Barbarians; I mean that suffered and described by Xenophon the Athenian. Again we witness the triumph of a personality, although that is not the important thing about the Retreat of the Ten Thousand. The important thing is the triumph of the Greek character in a body of rascal mercenaries. The personality of the young gentleman who gained so much authority with them found its opportunity in a crisis among ignorant men, but it never became a great one. To the last it was curiously immature. Perhaps it would be an apter metaphor to say of Xenophon what some one said of Pitt—“He did not grow, he was cast.” His natural tastes were very much those of a more generous and incomparably greater man, Sir Walter Scott. They were the tastes of a country gentleman with a love of literature and history, especially with a flavour of romance. The _Cyropaedia_ is the false dawn of the Historic Novel. Both Xenophon and Sir Walter wanted, probably more than anything else, to be soldiers. But Xenophon wanted to be too many things. Before his mind floated constantly the image of the “Archical Man”—the ideal Ruler—who had long exercised the thoughts of Greek philosophers, of none perhaps more than Socrates, whose pupil Xenophon professed himself to be. One day it seems to have struck him: Might not he, Xenophon, be the Archical Man? He may not have framed the thought so precisely, for it is of the kind that even youth does not always admit to itself; but the thought was there. It was his illusion. He was not born to command, he was born to write. He did not dominate, he was always more or less under the influence of some one else—Socrates, Cyrus, Agesilaos. He was an incredibly poor judge of men and the movement of affairs. But put a pen in his hands and you have, if not one of the great masters, yet a master in a certain vivid manner of his own.

He can have been little more than a boy when Fate sent him his incomparable adventure. The King of Persia had died leaving two sons, his heir and successor Artaxerxes, and Cyrus, the favourite of their dreadful mother, the dowager queen Parysatis. The younger son began secretly to collect and mobilize an army in Asia Minor, where authority had been delegated to him, intending to march without declaration of war against Artaxerxes. Xenophon was introduced to Cyrus by Proxenos of Boeotia, who indeed had induced him to visit Sardis. Proxenos, says his friend, _thought it was sufficient for being and being thought an Archical Man to praise him who did well and to refrain from praising the wrongdoer. Consequently the nice people among those who came into contact with him liked him, but he suffered from the designs of the unscrupulous, who felt that they could do what they pleased with him_. Xenophon appears to have fallen immediately under the spell of Cyrus, who undoubtedly has somewhat the air of a man of genius and who, as a scion of the Achaemenids, would in any case have inspired in him much the same feeling as a Bourbon inspired in Sir Walter Scott. In the army of invasion was a large body of Greek mercenary soldiers, chiefly from the Peloponnese, under the command of a hard-bitten Spartan _condottiere_ called Klearchos. Xenophon joined this force as a volunteer. He believed at the time, as did Proxenos, who was one of the “generals” (_Strategi_), and indeed everybody except Klearchos, who was in the secret, that the expedition was preparing against the Pisidians, hill-tribes delighting in brigandage. It was not until the army had passed the “Cilician Gates” of the Taurus and had reached Tarsus that the Greek troops found confirmed their growing suspicion that they were being led against the King. They protested and refused to go farther. Their discontent was allayed with difficulty, but it is clear that Xenophon had already made up his mind. He went with the rest. They threaded the “Syrian Gates” of the range called Amanus, and struck across the desert. Having reached the Euphrates, they followed the river into “Babylonia,” what we call Mesopotamia, as far as Kunaxa, in the region where the two great streams begin to open out again after coming so close in the neighbourhood of Bagdad. At Kunaxa the Great King met them with an enormous army. A huge disorderly battle followed, in which the Greeks very easily dispersed everything that met them—but Cyrus was slain.

What were they to do? The whole purpose of the campaign—to put Cyrus on the throne—had vanished. It was clear to them that they could not rely on the Barbarians who had marched with them the two thousand miles from Sardis. Nothing to do but retreat. But retreat by the way they had come was no longer possible, since they had eaten up the country. It remained to follow the line of the Tigris up into Armenia, and so cross—in the winter—that savage plateau, in the hope of coming at last to Trebizond, away there on the Euxine, all those leagues away.

So they set out. It was the first requirement of their plan to cross Babylonia to the Tigris. Breaking up their camp at dawn, they were alarmed in the afternoon by the sight of horses, which at first they took for Persian cavalry, but soon discovered to be baggage-animals out at grass. That in itself was surprising—it seemed the King’s encampment must be near. They continued their advance, and at sunset the vanguard entered and took up their quarters in some deserted and pillaged huts, while the rest of the army, with much shouting in the darkness, found such accommodation outside as they could. That was a night of panics. An inexplicable uproar broke out in camp, which Klearchos allayed by proclaiming a reward for information against “the individual who let loose the donkey.” The enemy, as appeared in the morning, had been equally nervous. At least he had vanished from the neighbourhood. Moreover heralds now appeared offering a truce from the King. The offer was accepted under promise that the Greek army would be provisioned. So the host set out again under the guidance of the King’s messengers through a country all criss-crossed by irrigation-ditches, looking suspiciously full of water for the time of year. However, they soon reached some villages full of food and drink. There were some dates ... “like amber,” says Xenophon reminiscently. (He had got no breakfast that morning.) Here also they tasted “the brain of the palm”—the “cabbage”—delicious, but it gave them a headache.

In these excellent villages they remained three days and continued negotiations with Tissaphernes, the subtle representative of the King. As a result of the conversations they moved on again under the satrap’s direction as far as the towering “Wall of Media,” which crossed the land in a diagonal line towards Babylon, being twenty feet broad, a hundred feet high, and twenty leagues long. From the Wall they marched between twenty and thirty miles, crossing canals and ditches, until they struck the Tigris at Sittakê, where they encamped in a “paradise” full of trees. At the bridge of Sittakê met the roads to Lydia and Armenia, to Susa and Ecbatana (Hamadan). Next morning the Greeks crossed without opposition and advanced as far as a considerable stream traversed by a bridge at “Opis,” near which populous centre they found themselves observed by a large force of Asiatics. Thereupon Klearchos led his men past in column two abreast, now marching and now halting them. Every time the vanguard stopped the order to halt went echoing down the line, and had barely died out in the distance when the advance was resumed; _so that even to the Greeks themselves the army seemed enormous, while the Persian looking on was astounded_.

They were now in “Media”—really Assyria—a very different country from the “Garden of Eden” they had left on the other side of the Tigris. They marched and marched, and at last reached a cluster of dwellings called the “Villages of Parysatis.” Then another twenty leagues to the town of Kainai and the confluence of the Tigris with the Greater Zab, on whose bank they rested three days. All this time the enemy, although never attacking, had been following in a watchful cloud. Klearchos therefore sought an interview with Tissaphernes to discover his intentions. The satrap responded with Oriental courtesy and invited to a discussion at his headquarters Klearchos and the other generals, namely Proxenos, Menon, Agias and Socrates the Achaean. With grave misgivings, relying on the faith of the Barbarian, they entered the Persian camp. There they were immediately arrested. The officers who had accompanied the generals were cut down, and the Persian cavalry galloped out over the plain, killing every Greek they could find. The Hellenes from their camp could make out that something unusual was happening in that distant cloud of horse, but what it was they never guessed until Nikarchos the Arcadian came tearing along with his hands upon a great wound in his belly, holding in his entrails. He told them his story; they ran to arm themselves. However, the enemy did not come on. Meanwhile the generals were sent to the King, who had them beheaded.

As for the leaderless men, _few of them tasted food that evening, only a few kindled a fire, many did not trouble to return to their quarters at all, but lay down where each happened to find himself, unable to close their eyes for misery and longing for the home-town, and father, and mother, and the wife, and the baby_. Xenophon got a little sleep at last, and as he slept he dreamed that his father’s house was struck by a thunderbolt and set on fire. The dream was so vivid that he awoke and began to ponder what it might signify. His excited imagination revived in still more startling colours the terrors of the situation. Here was the stage set for a moving scene. Where was the hero? Where was the Archical Man? Here at last was the opportunity he had prayed for. There was kindled that night in Xenophon the flame of a resolution which, while it lasted, did really keep at the heroic pitch a spirit secretly doubtful of itself. It was the sense of drama acting on an artistic temperament; and of course that army, being Greek, accepted the miracle and naturally assumed its rôle. The gentleman ranker developed a Napoleonic energy, and made eloquent speeches (for which he dressed very carefully); with the result that he was chosen one of the new generals. He became in fact henceforward the leading spirit, and was entrusted with the most difficult task—the command of the rearguard in a fighting retreat. He made mistakes; he was not a Napoleon. But the distinguished French officer who has written the best military history of the Retreat gives him high credit for his grasp of the principles of war, which General Boucher believes he learned from Socrates. Perhaps you have not thought of Socrates as an authority on the art of war?