BOOK V

e)ta/xqhsan. The phrase probably implies that the plan of operations was devised at Susa, not by the satrap Artaphrenes. Apparently the campaign against Ionia is roughly synchronous with those by which the Hellespont and Caria were recovered.

Flight and death of Aristagoras. H., who consistently depreciates the Ionic revolt (ch. 28, 97 n.; vi. 3 n.), naturally regards its authors as untrustworthy adventurers. Aristagoras is moved to action by his own financial difficulties, and fear of losing his tyranny (ch. 35). He has a glib tongue to deceive the multitude (v. 97) and a bribe for the Spartan king (v. 51), but he takes no active part in warfare, e.g. in the march on Sardis (v. 99) or the expedition to Cyprus (v. 108 f.). Here he is represented as a coward deserting those he has led into danger. But it would seem probable that discontent had been rife in Western Asia Minor since 512 B. C. (iv. 137), and that there was a widespread movement against the local tyrants imposed by Persia (v. 37), the message of Histiaeus (v. 35) being merely the signal and the expedition to Naxos the opportunity for a premeditated rising (cf. ch. 36 n.; Grundy, p. 84 f.). Aristagoras may have been merely the mouthpiece of the general discontent or [p. 66] the agent of Histiaeus, but the wide extent and initial success of the revolt shows that it was something more than a plot of selfish intriguers.

*le/ron: a small island some thirty miles south-west of Miletus, colonized thence (Strabo 635). The suggestion of Hecataeus seems absurd, though there was perhaps more hope of defeating the Phoenician fleet than the Persian army which threatened Miletus.

The date which suits H.'s narrative best, 497 B. C. (cf. what is said of Histiaeus, v. 108. 1, vi. 1. 1), is rendered certain by chronological data supplied by Thucydides (iv. 102), who reckons sixty years between the Athenian foundation of Amphipolis in 437-436 B. C. (Diod. xii. 32) and the attempt of Aristagoras (cf. Busolt, iii. 199 f.).

po/lin: almost certainly Ἐννέα Ὁδοί (vii. 114), the later Amphipolis (Thuc. iv. 102). The vagueness of H.'s topography, both here and in ix. 75 n., makes it probable that he wrote these passages before 437 B. C.