122 THE HISTORY OF HERODOTUS.

fought most valiantly, and cut off a whole Persian division by an ambuscade. Though they lost in one battle ten thousand men, yet their spirit was unbroken. Miletus, too, still held out gallantly. If any man un- der these circumstances ought to have shown an ex- ample of self-devotion, that man was Aristagoras. But nerve is inconsistent with levity of character. It often happens that the coward runs into the jaws of his fate, and so it happened to him. He abandoned the Ionian cause, and with some of his partisans sailed away for his father-in-law's new settlement in Thrace, where he was killed while besieging some petty town. He had been just in time to make .his fruitless escape, for the Persians now proceeded to invest Miletus by land and sea. The allied Greeks decided on leaving it to defend itself by land, and concentrating their fleet at a small island off the coast. The allies counted in all three hundred and fifty triremes, which were confronted by six hundred in the service of Persia. The Persian com-, manders first tried to dissolve the hostile confedera- tion by sending the deposed despots each to their own countrymen with promises of pardon on submission, and threats of extermination in case of prolonged resistance. The plan so far failed that it did not supersede the ne- cessity of an action, for each separate state imagined it- self the only one to which overtures were made. The Ionian captains, in their council of war, now agreed to put themselves all under the command of Dionysius of Phocaea. He set to work to put the ships in con- stant training, especially practising a manoeuvre some- thing like that of Nelson, attacking the enemy's line in columns, and cutting through it. The inven- tion of steam-rams seems likely to make the sea-fights