29 Cyrus and the Ionians (§141)

After the fall of Sardis the Ionian Greeks are naturally alarmed about their safety and appeal to Cyrus to treat them as subjects on the same terms as Croesus had treated them. The king replies with a fable: A flute­ player once played the flute so that fish would come out of the sea and onto land. When they did not come, he took a net and drew out a great number of them. When they were leaping about in the net he said to them, “Don’t dance now, since you would not dance when I played the flute for you.” Cyrus was angry that the Ionians had not deserted Croesus earlier, when he had invited them through messengers, but now wished to be on friendly terms. In response to the fable, the Ionians (except for Miletus, which had made an agreement with Cyrus on the same terms as with Croesus) gather into their city Panionium and send to Sparta for help.

The instructive story, I think, puts Cyrus in a very bad light. He compares the Ionians to fish, an unintelligent animal; the flute-player presumes that the fish ought respond to his music as a matter of course. This expectation carries the implication that the flautist’s music is so over­ powering that the fish will violate their own nature as free creatures, a nature that they share with the freedom-loving Greeks, and sacrifice them­ selves to the flautist’s pleasure. Finally, the fish are helpless before the superior flautist, who can also fish, and he easily captures them with a net. Thus the story presents inevitability in the capture and death of the fish. The inviting music turns out to have been no invitation to a party; it was an invitation to the frying pan. The cruel reality is revealed: the fish, the Ionians, will perish no matter what. The macabre jest, that in their death throes the captured fish are “dancing,” shows a certain brutal pleasure in their suffering. If we have become sympathetic to Cyrus by his treatment of Croesus and by the cleverness he displayed in gaining the throne, this story draws us away from him. Here we see that the Greeks are to him the butt of a joke, lowly animals whose only purpose is to feed his frenzy for power.