The Historians' History of the World 04

Through Thrace and Macedonia the country was friendly, or feared to avow hostility. Thessaly, inimically disposed, and powerful through population and wealth resulting from the natural productiveness of the soil, was however too ill-governed to give any systematical opposition. The defiles of the mountains against Macedonia, where a small force might efficaciously oppose a large one, seem to have been left open. But the influence of the principal towns, Larissa, Cranon, Scotussa, and Pharsalus, in close alliance with the Bœotians, decided the rest, and as the Lacedæmonian army crossed the plain a body of horse, raised from the whole province, infested the march. It was singularly gratifying to Agesilaus that, with his horse, promiscuously collected, and entirely formed by himself, supporting it judiciously with his infantry, he defeated and dispersed the Thessalian, the most celebrated cavalry of Greece.

On the day after this success he reached the highlands of Phthia; and thence the country was friendly quite to the border of Bœotia. But there news met him, unwelcome for the public, unwelcome on his private account, and such as instantly almost to blot out his once bright prospect, which, as the historian, his friend and the companion of his march, shows, he had thus far been fondly cherishing, of conquest in Asia, and glory over the world. While the misconduct of the Lacedæmonian administration had excited a confederacy within Greece, which proposed to overwhelm Lacedæmon by superiority of land-force, and, with that view, to carry war directly into Laconia, a hostile navy had arisen in another quarter, powerful enough to have already deprived her, by one blow, of her new dominion of the sea. The train of circumstances which had produced this event, though memorials fail for a complete investigation of it, will require some attention.

A Corinthian Vase

(In the Museum of Napoleon III)

We have seen Cyprus, at a very early age, from a Phœnician, become a Grecian island, and Salamis the first Grecian city founded there. We have then observed the Cyprian Greeks yielding to the Persian power. The ruin of the marine, the inertness of the court, and the distraction in the councils of Persia, which followed, would afford opportunity and temptation for the Cypriots, beyond other subjects of the empire, again to revolt; and the Persian interest, and the Greek, and the Phœnician, and the tyrannic, and the oligarchal, and the democratical, would be likely to fall into various contest. Such, as far as may be gathered, was the state of things which first invited Athenian ambition to direct its view to Cyprus, when the Athenian navy, rising on the ruins of the Persian, was extending dominion for Athens on all sides, under the first administration of Pericles. This view, quickly diverted to other objects, was however, after a change in the Athenian administration, resumed; and Cimon, as we have seen, died in command in Cyprus. The policy of Athens would of course propose to hold dominion, there as elsewhere, through support given to the democratical interest. But after the death of Cimon wars so engaged the Athenian government as to prevent the extension of any considerable exertion to such a distance; and the Cyprian cities were mostly governed by their several princes or tyrants, under the paramount sovereignty of Persia.

Among the fugitive Greeks was Evagoras, a youth who claimed descent from the ancient princes of Salamis, of the race of Teucer. Informed of the state of things, this young man formed the bold resolution, with only about fifty fellow-sufferers in exile, devoted to his cause, to attempt the recovery of what he claimed as his paternal principality. From Soli in Cilicia, their place of refuge, they passed to the Cyprian shore, and proceeded to Salamis by night. Knowing the place well, they forced a small gate, probably as in peace, unguarded, marched directly to the palace, and, after a severe conflict, overcoming the tyrant’s guard, while the people mostly kept aloof, they remained masters of the city, and Evagoras resumed the sovereignty.