SECTION 10. THE FIRST COUNTER-ATTACKS
This, however, is to anticipate the sequel. Let us finally fix our eyes on the Eastern world in 400 B.C. and review it as it must then have appeared to eyes from which the future was all concealed. The coasts of Asia Minor, generally speaking, were in Greek hands, the cities being autonomous trading communities, as Greeks understood autonomy; but most of them until four years previously had acknowledged the suzerainty or rather federal leadership of Athens and now were acknowledging less willingly a Spartan supremacy established at first with Persian co-operation. Many of these cities, which had long maintained very close relations with the Persian governors of the nearer hinterland, not only shaped their policy to please the latter, but even acknowledged Persian suzerainty; and since, as it happens, at this particular moment Sparta had fallen out with Persia, and a Spartan army, under Dercyllidas, was occupying the Aeolian district of the north, the "medizing" cities of Ionia and Caria were in some doubt of their future. On the whole they inclined still to the satraps. Persian influence and even control had, in fact, greatly increased on the western coast since the supersession of Athens by a power unaccustomed to imperial politics and notoriously inapt in naval matters; and the fleets of Phoenicia and Cyprus, whose Greek princes had fallen under Phoenician domination, had regained supremacy at sea.
Yet, only a year before, "Ten Thousand" heavy-armed Greeks (and near half as many again of all arms), mostly Spartan, had marched right through western Asia. They went as mercenary allies of a larger native force led by Cyrus, Persian prince-governor of west central Anatolia, who coveted the diadem of his newly enthroned brother. Having traversed the old Lydian and Phrygian kingdoms they moved down into Cilicia and up again over north Syria to the Euphrates, bound (though they only learned it at last by the waters of the Great River itself) for Babylon. But they never reached that city. Cyrus met death and his oriental soldiers accepted defeat at Cunaxa, some four days' march short of the goal. But the undefeated Greeks, refusing to surrender, and, few though they were, so greatly dreaded by the Persians that they were not directly molested, had to get back to their own land as best they might. How, robbed of their original leaders they yet reached the Black Sea and safety by way of the Tigris valley and the wild passes of Kurdish Armenia all readers of Xenophon, the Athenian who succeeded to the command, know well. Now in 400 B.C. they were reappearing in the cities of west Asia and Europe to tell how open was the inner continent to bold plunderers and how little ten Orientals availed in attack or defence against one Greek. Such stories then and there incited Sparta to a forward policy, and one day would encourage a stronger Western power than hers to march to the conquest of the East.
We are fortunate in having Xenophon's detailed narrative of the adventures of these Greeks, if only because it throws light by the way on inner Asia almost at the very moment of our survey. We see Sardes under Persia what it had been under Lydia, the capital city of Anatolia; we see the great valley plains of Lydia and Phrygia, north and south, well peopled, well supplied, and well in hand, while the rough foothills and rougher heights of Taurus are held by contumacious mountaineers who are kept out of the plains only by such periodic chastisement as Cyrus allowed his army to inflict in Pisidia and Lycaonia. Cilicia is being administered and defended by its own prince, who bears the same name or title as his predecessor in the days of Sennacherib, but is feudally accountable to the Great King. His land is so far his private property that Cyrus, though would-be lord of all the empire, encourages the pillage of the rich provincial capital. The fleet of Cyrus lands men and stores unmolested in north Syria, while the inner country up to the Euphrates and down its valley as far as Babylonia is at peace. The Great King is able to assemble above half a million men from the east and south to meet his foe, besides the levy of Media, a province which now seems to include most of the ancient Assyria. These hundreds of thousands constitute a host untrained, undisciplined, unstable, unused to service, little like the ordered battalions of an essentially military power such as the Assyrian had been.
From the story of the Retreat certain further inferences may be drawn. First, Babylonia was a part of the empire not very well affected to the Great King; or else the Greeks would have been neither allowed by the local militia to enter it so easily nor encouraged by the Persians to leave it. Second, the ancient Assyria was a peaceful province not coerced by a standing Persian force or garrisons of any strength. Third, southern Kurdistan was not held by or for the Great King and it paid tribute only to occasional pressure. Fourth, the rest of Kurdistan and Armenia as far north as the upper arm of the Euphrates was held, precariously, by the Persians; and lastly, north of the Euphrates valley up to the Black Sea all was practical independence. We do not know anything precise about the far eastern provinces or the south Syrian in this year, 400. Artaxerxes, the Great King, came from Susa to meet his rebellious brother, but to Babylon he returned to put to death the betrayed leaders of the Greeks. At this moment Ctesias, the Cnidian Greek, was his court physician and no friend either to Cyrus or to Spartans; he was even then in correspondence with the Athenian Conon who would presently be made a Persian admiral and smash the Spartan fleet. Of his history of Persia some few fragments and some epitomized extracts relating to this time have survived. These have a value, which the mass of his book seems not to have had; for they relate what a contemporary, singularly well placed to learn court news, heard and saw. One gathers that king and court had fallen away from the ideas and practice of the first Cyrus. Artaxerxes was unwarlike, lax in religion (though he had been duly consecrated at Pasargadae) and addicted to non-Zoroastrian practices. Many Persians great and small were disaffected towards him and numbers rallied to his brother; but he had some Western adventurers in his army. Royal ladies wielded almost more power at the court than the Great King, and quarrelled bitterly with one another.
Plutarch, who drew material for his life of Artaxerxes not only from Ctesias, but also from authorities now lost to us, leaves us with much the same impression of the lords of the East at the close of the fifth century B.C. Corrupt and treacherous central rule, largely directed by harem intrigue; an unenthusiastic body of subjects, abandoned to the schemes of satraps; inefficient and casually collected armies in which foreign mercenaries were almost the only genuine soldiers - such was Persia now. It was something very unlike the vigorous rule of Cyrus and the imperial system of the first Darius - something very like the Ottoman Empire in the eighteenth century A.D. - something which would collapse before the first Western leader of men who could command money of his own making and a professional army of his own people.