attack came, and gave Alexander his hardest fighting in the three great
battles which decided the fate of the East. None the less, such an
attitude towards Greeks was suicidal. It exalted the spirit of Europe
while it depraved the courage and sapped the self-reliance of Asia.


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.