The Historians' History of the World 04

As soon as spring arrived, Pharnabazus embarked on board a powerful fleet equipped by Conon; directing his course to Melos, to various islands among the Cyclades, and lastly to the coast of Peloponnesus. They here spent some time on the coast of Laconia and Messenia, disembarking at several points to ravage the country. They next landed on the island of Cythera, which they captured, granting safe retirement to the Lacedæmonian garrison, and leaving in the island a garrison under the Athenian Nicophemus. Quitting then the harbourless, dangerous, and ill-provided coast of Laconia, they sailed up the Saronic Gulf to the Isthmus of Corinth. Here they found the confederates—Corinthian, Bœotian, Athenian, etc.—carrying on war, with Corinth as their central post, against the Lacedæmonians at Sicyon. The line across the isthmus from Lechæum to Cenchreæ (the two ports of Corinth) was now made good by a defensive system of operations, so as to confine the Lacedæmonians within Peloponnesus; just as Athens, prior to her great losses in 446 B.C., while possessing both Megara and Pegæ, had been able to maintain the inland road midway between them, where it crosses the high and difficult crest of Mount Geranea, thus occupying the only three roads by which a Lacedæmonian army could march from the Isthmus of Corinth into Attica or Bœotia. Pharnabazus communicated in the most friendly manner with the allies, assured them of his strenuous support against Sparta, and left with them a considerable sum of money.

The appearance of a Persian satrap with a Persian fleet, as master of the Peloponnesian Sea and the Saronic Gulf, was a phenomenon astounding to Grecian eyes. And if it was not equally offensive to Grecian sentiment, this was in itself a melancholy proof of the degree to which Panhellenic patriotism had been stifled by the Peloponnesian War and the Spartan empire. No Persian tiara had been seen near the Saronic Gulf since the battle of Salamis; nor could anything short of the intense personal wrath of Pharnabazus against the Lacedæmonians, and his desire to revenge upon them the damage inflicted by Dercyllidas and Agesilaus, have brought him now as far away from his own satrapy. It was this wrathful feeling of which Conon took advantage to procure from him a still more important boon.

Since 404 B.C., a space of eleven years, Athens had continued without any walls round her seaport town Piræus, and without any Long Walls to connect her city with Piræus. To this state she had been condemned by the sentence of her enemies, in the full knowledge that she could have little trade—few ships either armed or mercantile—poor defence even against pirates, and no defence at all against aggression from the mistress of the sea. Conon now entreated Pharnabazus, who was about to go home, to leave the fleet under his command, and to permit him to use it in rebuilding the fortifications of Piræus as well as the Long Walls of Athens. While he engaged to maintain the fleet by contributions from the islands, he assured the satrap that no blow could be inflicted upon Sparta so destructive or so mortifying, as the renovation of Athens and Piræus with their complete and connected fortifications. Sparta would thus be deprived of the most important harvest which she had reaped from the long struggle of the Peloponnesian War. Indignant as he now was against the Lacedæmonians, Pharnabazus sympathised cordially with these plans, and on departing not only left the fleet under the command of Conon, but also furnished him with a considerable sum of money towards the expense of the fortifications.

CONON REBUILDS THE LONG WALLS

[393 B.C.]