European shore by an unauthorised private adventurer, the elder Miltiades. He was invited by a native tribe of the Peninsula to help them against some powerful neighbours, and with a company of free lances succeeded in establishing an independent principality, including the whole of the Thracian Chersonese, the Peninsula of Gallipoli; and this after his death passed to his nephew, the younger and more famous Miltiades.

But Croesus, the personal friend of the elder Miltiades, had by this time fallen before the new Persian power; in the days of the nephew the eastern flood swept over the whole of Asia Minor. Darius invaded Scythia by way of the Bosporus, returning by Sestos, and carried with him, together with all the other small Greek princes, the 'tyrant' of the Chersonese as a mere satellite in his train. Miltiades was no friend to Darius, and finding his position unbearable retired to Athens, where in 490 he took at Marathon a brilliant revenge on his former master.

It was not, however, till ten years later, after the final defeat of Xerxes, that Athens could think of regaining her lost hold on the Chersonese. She lost not a moment when the occasion came. No sooner had the Persian fleet been finally defeated at Mycale than Spartans and Athenians sailed off to Sestos to destroy the bridge which formed the Persian communication with Europe. They arrived there to find that storms had done the work for them. The Spartans were satisfied and sailed home; but the Athenians determined to stay till they had captured Sestos itself. With the fall of the town Herodotus appropriately closes his history; for the recovery of the place marks the end of the struggle against Persia, and the opening of a new era, that of the Athenian Empire.

Athens, essentially a commercial and industrial state, was wholly dependent upon imports for the food of her people; and by holding the Hellespont she could secure the passage of the Euxine corn-ships upon which her very existence depended. As her empire began by the capture of Sestos, so it was destroyed close to Sestos in the battle of Ægospotami. The Hellespont was always the central point on which the operations of her fleet turned, at the first and at the last. The peninsula she

held by planting a large body of her own colonists there; for her grasp on the Asiatic shore she was dependent on a number of Greek cities, nominally independent allies, but practically subjects so long as she was able to hold them down. The key to the position was Sestos, her own colony. Next in importance was Abydos on the opposite Asiatic shore. The two were always closely bound together by nature; even in Homer they appear under the same ruler.

Abydos had by far the most important harbour-the best natural harbour, indeed, in the whole Troad. The low spit which we know as Nagara Point juts out at right angles to a range of low hills running along the eastern side of the Narrows, and forms a bay sheltered alike from the force of the current and of the winds; while the hills above the bay form a defence for the town which lay at their feet. The harbour is one at which every ship passing up the channel was bound to touch; for Nagara Point is the hardest of all in the Hellespont for a ship to weather.

But, as Abydos' commanded the traffic of the Straits, so Sestos commanded Abydos itself. Abydos lay low, on the shore and the sloping hillsides; Sestos was raised on a plateau lying some 300 feet above the sea. The plateau commands a view down the whole length of the Narrows from north to south; and it is high enough to look right over the low point of Nagara into the harbour of Abydos, at a distance of three miles, so that all movements of shipping could be easily observed. Sestos lay, moreover, up stream, and the current and prevailing winds gave its ships the permanent weather-gage of those at Abydos. A ship of war could descend on Abydos in an easy half-hour; but from Abydos ships could only reach the harbour of Sestos by a toilsome and devious course against the current, passing of necessity for a great part of the way right under the walls of the fortress. The harbour of Sestos was not in itself as good as that of Abydos; for the bay now called Ak-bashi liman, though offering good anchorage, has not equal shelter against the north-east winds. This was, no doubt, remedied by moles; in all other respects Sestos had the advantage. The harbour lay on the north side of the town, completely invisible

from Abydos itself; and the cliffs and ravines which surround the plateau with a steep and high scarp on every side rendered it one of the strongest fortresses of the ancient world. So long as it served for the base of a powerful fleet, Abydos was at its mercy, and Athens had absolute command of the passage, protecting the whole course of her merchant ships as they passed up with merchandise for the rich Euxine colonies and returned with the indispensable wheat for the granaries of the Piræus.

No wonder Abydos always hated Athens, as Demosthenes says she did. The turn of Abydos came after the great Athenian disaster before Syracuse. Abydos was one of the first towns to throw off her allegiance to the Attic confederacy; and from that moment the last act of the Peloponnesian War consists of the desperate struggle of Athens to hold the Hellespont from Sestos alone against the hostility of Abydos. The fortunes of war varied for some years; Athens gained naval victories in the Straits themselves, one of them in 411 off the promontory of Cynossema, which we now call Kilid-ul-bahr. In 406 the victory of Arginusæ seemed to give Athens the definite naval predominance. But Sparta produced, as usual, the commander of genius who reversed the position. Lysander, with the aid of Persian gold, built a new fleet, and in 405, after various manœuvres to throw the Athenians off their guard, entered the Hellespont unattacked. Here he showed the strategic insight which his predecessors had lacked. The Spartans had hitherto confined themselves to defending Abydos, so accepting all the disadvantages of the position. Lysander boldly sailed up the Straits to the northern end, and, with the aid of a land force, stormed and held the important town of Lampsacus.

The Athenian fleet, sailing in pursuit, found on its arrival at Sestos that it was for the first time in a strategically inferior position. Lysander, with stream and wind to back him, had the weather-gage, with all the advantage of the initiative, and could attack at his pleasure. An Athenian admiral might, one would think, have two alternatives. He might either attempt to seize Callipolis (Gallipoli), where he would at once have recovered the initiative, with a good harbour and the

weather-gage for his ships; or he might decide to remain on the defensive at Sestos, with at least a strongly fortified base. But the Athenians had no admiral; they had a committee of admirals, and the committee made the usual compromise; they neither went to Callipolis nor stayed at Sestos, but went half way to the little stream of Egospotami. They thus ingeniously put themselves at every possible disadvantage. They had no harbour; their ships were moored off a muddy delta, with no sort of protection. They were still down wind and stream, and at a distance which made observation and sudden attack easier than ever; and, worst of all, they were cut off from their base at Sestos, with no organised means of supplies. There was neither market nor town near them; and they could provision themselves only by the primitive method of sending the crews to forage in the country.

Day by day they made in the morning ineffective attempts to lure Lysander to fight; they could not attack the Spartan fleet as it lay close to land protected by a strong army, and Lysander was too wise to be drawn. The afternoons had to be spent in foraging expeditions. On the fifth day Lysander ordered his swift scouts to heliograph to him, by the simple device of hoisting a bright shield on the mast, as soon as the Athenian crews were well on shore. Then he made his pounce. He was on the empty ships long before the crews could be re-embarked; and, while the Athenians looked on in helpless rage from the shore, the fleet was annihilated. Sestos fell at once; and Athens, with her food supply cut off, had no choice but to surrender at discretion. So it was that the winds and currents of the Hellespont destroyed an empire at the very spot where it had been founded.

The subsequent history of the defence of the Straits based on Sestos and Abydos, the stage which, because in the days of Athens it had the greatest significance for the world, we have called the Athenian period, must be briefly dismissed. Two generations after Egospotami Athens recovered sufficiently to found a second empire; and this again was based on the Hellespont. Students of Demosthenes will remember the weary maze of fighting and

intrigue which led to the culmination of this brief and unstable renascence in the recapture of Sestos. But the new confederation went to pieces almost at once. The Hellespont fell into the hands of Alexander without a blow after his conquest of mainland Greece; the Persians waited for him to cross, and struck too late. It was not till 200 B.C., when Rome was stretching her hands eastwards, that the Straits assumed a momentary importance. Philip V of Macedon, anticipating an attack by the combined forces of Rome and Attalus of Pergamon, decided to seize the Straits as a measure of defence; his campaign ended with the capture of Abydos after a siege memorable among the sieges of the world for the desperate resistance of the inhabitants, and their universal suicide when the walls at last fell. But this serves only to illustrate the fact that the Straits are unimportant as a line of defence; the Romans had no thought of attacking on this side, and it was not on the Hellespont but in Thessaly that they crushed Philip. Thereafter their power over Asia grew steadily by the land routes. Abydos settled down, when Asia Minor had become Roman, into the comfortable position of a commercial town and chief toll-station; the taxes on shipping formed an important part of the revenue of the empire for many centuries. The purely military position of Sestos became useless, and we hear little or nothing of it till the days of Justinian. He, finding so naturally strong a site neglected and deserted, built there an 'impregnable castle.' But it was, like much of Justinian's work, a piece of mere ostentation. The enemies he had to resist were pressing from the north and the east, not from the west. It may have been a recognition of the uselessness of the fortress that brought it the not very complimentary name of Choiridokastron, Pig's Castle.'

The pressure from the west began again in the 11th century; and nothing can better mark the imbecility of Byzantine government than the fact that the Eastern empire never seems to have made any attempt to defend itself in the really vital point. Pretenders to the throne, Franks, Genoese, Crusaders, seem to have passed up and down the Straits with hardly even a show of resistance, The Fourth Crusade' established itself in 1204 at Abydos, a town moult bele et moult bien