The commanders of the victorious Grecian fleet had full confidence in their power of defending the islands, and willingly admitted the Chians, Samians, Lesbians, and the other islanders hitherto subjects of Persia, to the protection and reciprocal engagements of their alliance. We may presume that the despots Stratis and Theomêstor were expelled from Chios and Samos.[405] But the Peloponnesian commanders hesitated in guaranteeing the same secure autonomy to the continental cities, which could not be upheld against the great inland power without efforts incessant as well as exhausting. Nevertheless, not enduring to abandon these continental Ionians to the mercy of Xerxes, they made the offer to transplant them into European Greece, and to make room for them by expelling the _medizing_ Greeks from their seaport towns. But this proposition was at once repudiated by the Athenians, who would not permit that colonies originally planted by themselves should be abandoned, thus impairing the metropolitan dignity of Athens.[406] The Lacedæmonians readily acquiesced in this objection, and were glad, in all probability, to find honorable grounds for renouncing a scheme of wholesale dispossession eminently difficult to execute,[407]—yet, at the same time, to be absolved from onerous obligations towards the Ionians, and to throw upon Athens either the burden of defending or the shame of abandoning them. The first step was thus taken, which we shall quickly see followed by others, for giving to Athens a separate ascendency and separate duties in regard to the Asiatic Greeks, and for introducing first, the confederacy of Delos,—next, Athenian maritime empire. [405] Herodot. viii, 132. [406] Herodot. ix, 106; Diodor. xi, 37. The latter represents the Ionians and Æolians as having actually consented to remove into European Greece, and indeed the Athenians themselves as having at first consented to it, though the latter afterwards repented and opposed the scheme. [407] Such wholesale transportations of population from one continent to another have always been more or less in the habits of Oriental despots, the Persians in ancient times and the Turks in more modern times: to a conjunction of free states, like the Greeks, they must have been impracticable. See Von Hammer, Geschichte des Osmanischen Reiches, vol. i, book vi, p. 251, for the forced migrations of people from Asia into Europe, directed by the Turkish Sultan Bajazet (A. D. 1390-1400).