furnished to him by Isagoras. In his next step he encountered an unexpected opposition. The Council of Five Hundred refused to be dissolved, and the Spartan king with Isagoras and his adherents took refuge in the Akropolis. But he had no means of withstanding a blockade, and on the third day he agreed to leave the city with his Spartan force. The departure of Kleomenes was followed by the restoration of Kleisthenes and the seven hundred exiled families; but impelled by the conviction that between Sparta and Athens there was a deadly quarrel, the Athenians made an effort to anticipate the intrigues of Hippias, and sent an embassy to Sardeis to make an independent alliance with the Persian king. The envoys on being admitted to the presence of Artaphernes were asked who they were and where they lived, and were then told that Dareios would admit them to an alliance on their giving him earth and water. To this demand of absolute subjection the envoys gave an assent which was indignantly repudiated by the whole body of Athenian citizens.

But Kleomenes had not yet laid aside the hope of punishing the Athenians. On his retreat from the city he took the road which led him by Plataia, a small Boiotian town about thirty miles distant from Athens. This town the Thebans claimed as their latest colony; but the Plataians, who were probably unwilling subjects, availed themselves of the presence of Kleomenes. to surrender themselves and their city on condition of being admitted among the allies of Sparta. For the Spartans he felt that the alliance had no attraction and must be a source of annoyance and trouble; but he was not unwilling to suggest a step which should transfer this annoyance to Athens and lead perhaps to a series of wars between that city and the Theban confederacy. The distance of Sparta was alleged as a reason why the Plataians should look out for nearer allies; and the Athenians were named as those who were best able to help them. The counsel was followed, and Plataia became the ally of Athens.

Foiled for the time in his efforts, Kleomenes was not cast down. Regarding the Kleisthenean constitution as a personal insult to himself, he was determined that Isagoras should be despot of Athens. With this view he gathered a force from all parts of Peloponnesos and marched to Eleusis with an army from which he carefully concealed the purpose of the campaign.

The appearance of the Athenians, and possibly the tidings of a Boiotian invasion of Attica on the north, taught them what this purpose was; and Kleomenes found that his opponents were not confined to the Kleisthenean council of Five Hundred. Corinthians, confessing that they had come on an unrighteous errand, went home, followed by the other Spartan king, Demaratos the son of Ariston.

The

The Athenians were now free to turn their arms against their other enemies. They marched against the Chalkidians; but as they fell in with the Boiotians who were hastening to their aid at the Euripos, they attacked these first, and having inflicted on them a signal defeat, crossed on the same day into Euboia and won another great victory over the Chalkidians. The Chalkidians were further punished. Four thousand Athenian settlers, who under the title of Klerouchoi retained all their rights as citizens, were placed on the lands of the wealthy Chalkidian owners called Hippobotai or horse-feeders, and served like the Roman Coloniæ as a garrison in a conquered country.

Such were the first-fruits of Athenian freedom. It was now clear to the Spartan king and to his countrymen that the Athenians would not acquiesce in the predominance of Sparta; that if they retained their freedom, the power of Athens would soon become equal to their own; and that their only safety lay in providing the Athenians with a tyrant. An invitation was, therefore, sent to Hippias at Sigeion, to attend a congress of the allies of Sparta, who were summoned to meet on the arrival of the exiled despot.

The address of the Spartans to the allies thus convoked was brief, after their fashion, and to the point. It candidly confessed their folly in having been duped by the Pythia at Delphoi ; and not less candidly it besought the allies to help them in punishing the Athenians and in restoring to Hippias the power which he had lost. Indignantly condemning this selfish and heartless policy, Sosikles, the Corinthian envoy, confessed the wonder which their invitation to Hippias had excited at Corinth, and the still greater astonishment with which they now heard the explanation of a policy, in the guilt of which the Corinthians at least were resolved that they would not be partakers. The Spartan in this debate differed from the Corinthian only in the clearness with which he saw that there was that in Athenian

democracy which, if not repressed, must prove fatal to the oligarchical constitutions around it. To this point the Corinthian had not yet advanced, and he could urge now as a sacred thing the duty of not meddling with the internal affairs of an autonomous community. In the debates which preceded the outbreak of the Peloponnesian war the Corinthian deputies held a very different language. Their eyes had been opened in the meantime to the radical antagonism of the system in which every citizen is invested with legislative and judicial powers, and the system in which these powers are in the hands of an hereditary patrician caste.

That the Corinthians would be brought to see this hereafter, was the gist of the reply made by Hippias. The time was coming, he said, in which they would find the Athenians a thorn in their side. For the present his exhortations were thrown away. The allies protested unanimously against all attempts to interfere with the internal administration of any Hellenic city; and Hippias went back disappointed to Sigeion.

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BOOK II.

THE STRUGGLE WITH PERSIA, AND THE GROWTH OF THE ATHENIAN EMPIRE.

CHAPTER I.

THE PERSIAN EMPIRE UNDER CYRUS AND KAMBYSES.

THE Persian king by whose aid Hippias hoped to recover his lost power was lord of a vast inheritance of conquest. Within the compass of a few years the kingdoms of the Medes, the Lydians, and the Egyptians had been absorbed into the huge mass whose force was soon to be precipitated on the ill-cemented confederacy of the Hellenic tribes. If we follow the popular chronology, Peisistratos made himself despot at Athens at the very time when Cyrus founded this great empire by the dethronement of the Median Astyages. But the figure of Cyrus emerges only for a time from the cloud-land to which the earliest and the latest scenes of his life belong.

In the version of the tale which Herodotos followed, he was the grandson of the Median king Astyages, who, frightened by a prophecy that his daughter's child will be his ruin, gives the babe on its birth to Harpagos with orders that it shall be forthwith slain. By the advice of his wife Harpagos, instead of killing the child, places it in the hands of one of the royal herdsmen, who carries it home. Finding that his wife has just given birth to a dead infant, the herdsman exposes the corpse, and brings up Cyrus as his own son. But his high lineage cannot be hidden. In the village sports the boy plays the king so well that a complaint is carried to Astyages; and by the severe judge is found to be the child who had been doomed to die but who turns out to be the man born to be a king. Astyages is awe-struck; but nevertheless he takes vengance on Harpagos by inviting him to a banquet at which the wretched man feasts on the body of his own son, and his fears are quieted