t was a Greek, we
must remember, whom the great king commissioned to navigate the course
of the Indus and the waters of the Indian Ocean. At the same time, the
very ardour of their temperament, and their consequent pride, their
impatience of all regular control, their habitual proneness to
civic strife, and to sanguinary quarrels with the inhabitants of
the neighbouring cities, rendered them the most dangerous subjects
imaginable to govern, and their loyalty very uncertain. Moreover,
their admission as vassals of the Persian empire had not altered their
relations with European Greece, and commercial transactions between the
opposite shores of the AEgean, inter-marriages, the travels of voyagers,
movements of mercenaries, and political combinations, went on as freely
and frequently under the satraps of Sardes as under the Mermnadas. It
was to Corinth, Sparta, and Athens that the families banished by Cyrus
after his conquest fled for refuge, and every time a change of party
raised a new tyrant to power in one of the AEolian, Ionian, or Doric
communities, the adherents of the deposed ruler rushed in similar manner
to seek shelter among their friends across the sea, sure to repay their
hospitality should occasion ever require it. Plots and counterplots were
formed between the two shores, without any one paying much heed to the
imperial authority of Persia, and the constant support which the subject
Greeks found among their free brethren was bound before long to rouse
the anger of the court at Susa. When Polycrates, foreseeing the fall of
Amasis, placed himself under the suzerainty of Cambyses, the Corinthians
and Spartans came to besiege him in Samos without manifesting any
respect for the great king. They failed in this particular enterprise,*
but later on, after Oroetes had been seized and put to death, it was to
the Spartans that the successor of Polycrates, Maaandrios, applied
for help to assert his claim to the possession of the tyranny against
Syloson, brother of Polycrates and a personal friend of Darius.**

* The date of the death of Polycrates must be placed between
that of the conquest of Egypt and that of the revolt of
Gaumata, either in 524 or 523 B.C.

** The reinstatement of Syloson may be placed in 516 B.C.,
about the time when Darius was completing the reorganisation
of the empire and preparing to attack Greece.

This constant intervention of the foreigner was in evident contr