Besides the army thus collected around Miletus, Cyrus found means to keep other troops within his call, though at a distance and unsuspected. A Lacedæmonian officer named Klearchus, of considerable military ability and experience, presented himself as an exile at Sardis. He appears to have been banished, (as far as we can judge amidst contradictory statements,) for gross abuse of authority, and extreme tyranny, as Lacedæmonian Harmost at Byzantium, and even for having tried to maintain himself in that place after the Ephors had formally dismissed him. The known efficiency, and restless warlike appetite of Klearchus,[21] procured for him the confidence of Cyrus, who gave him the large sum of ten thousand Darics, (about £7600), which he employed in levying an army of mercenary Greeks for the defence of the Grecian cities in the Chersonese against the Thracian tribes in their neighborhood; thus maintaining the troops until they were required by Cyrus. Again, Aristippus and Menon,—Thessalians of the great family of the Aleuadæ at Larissa, who had maintained their tie of personal hospitality with the Persian royal family ever since the time of Xerxes, and were now in connection with Cyrus,[22]—received from him funds to maintain a force of two thousand mercenaries for their political purposes in Thessaly, subject to his call whenever he should require them. Other Greeks, too, who had probably contracted similar ties of hospitality with Cyrus by service during the late war,—Proxenus, a Bœotian; Agias and Sophænetus, Arcadians; Sokrates, an Achæan, etc.,—were also empowered by him to collect mercenary soldiers. His pretended objects were, partly the siege of Miletus; partly an ostensible expedition against the Pisidians,—warlike and predatory mountaineers who did much mischief from their fastnesses in the south-east of Asia Minor. [21] Xen. Anab. i, 1, 9; ii, 6, 3. The statements here contained do not agree with Diodor. xiv, 12; while both of them differ from Isokrates (Orat. viii, De Pace, s. 121; Or. xii, Panath. s. 111), and Plutarch, Artaxerxes, c. 6. I follow partially the narrative of Diodorus, so far as to suppose that the tyranny which he mentions was committed by Klearchus as Harmost of Byzantium. We know that there was a Lacedæmonian Harmost in that town, named as soon as the town was taken, by Lysander, after the battle of Ægospotami (Xen. Hellen. ii, 2, 2). This was towards the end of 405 B.C. We know farther, from the Anabasis, that Kleander was Harmost there in 400 B.C. Klearchus may have been Harmost there in 404 B.C. [22] Xen. Anab. i, 1, 10; Herodot. vii, 6; ix, 1; Plato, Menon, c. 1, p. 70; c. 11, p. 78 C.