Though the defeat at Salamis deprived the Persians of all hope from farther maritime attack of Greece, they still anticipated success by land from the ensuing campaign of Mardonius. Their fleet, after having conveyed the monarch himself with his accompanying land-force across the Hellespont, retired to winter at Kymê and Samos: in the latter of which places large rewards were bestowed upon Theomêstor and Phylakus, two Samian captains who had distinguished themselves in the late engagement. Theomêstor was even nominated despot of Samos under Persian protection.[293] Early in the spring they were reassembled, to the number of four hundred sail, but without the Phenicians, at the naval station of Samos, intending, however, only to maintain a watchful guard over Ionia, and hardly supposing that the Greek fleet would venture to attack them.[294] [293] Herodot. viii, 85. [294] Herodot. viii, 130; Diodor xi. 27. For a long time, the conduct of that fleet was such as to justify such a belief in its enemies. Assembled at Ægina in the spring, to the number of one hundred and ten ships, under the Spartan king Leotychidês, it advanced as far as Delos, but not farther eastward: nor could all the persuasions of Chian and other Ionian envoys, despatched both to the Spartan authorities and to the fleet, and promising to revolt from Persia as soon as the Grecian fleet should appear, prevail upon Leotychidês to hazard any aggressive enterprise. Ionia and the western waters of the Ægean had now been for fifteen years completely under the Persians, and so little visited by the Greeks, that a voyage thither appeared, especially to the maritime inexperience of a Spartan king, like going to the Pillars of Hêraklês,[295]—not less venturesome than the same voyage appeared fifty-two years afterwards to the Lacedæmonian admiral Alkidas, when he first hazarded his fleet amidst the preserved waters of the Athenian empire. [295] Herodot. viii, 131, 132: compare Thucyd. iii, 29-32. Herodotus says, that the Chian envoys had great difficulty in inducing Leotychidês to proceed even as far as Delos,—τὸ γὰρ προσωτέρω πᾶν δεινὸν ἦν τοῖσι Ἕλλησι, οὔτε τῶν χώρων ἐοῦσι ἐμπείροισι, στρατιῆς τε πάντα πλέα ἐδόκεε εἶναι· τὴν δὲ Σάμον ἐπιστέατο δόξῃ καὶ Ἡρακλέας στήλας ἴσον ἀπέχειν.