The History of the Ancient World: From the Earliest Accounts to the Fall of Rome

by Bauer, Susan Wise

  The Athenians were delivered from this mess by an unlikely savior: the elder king of Sparta. This king, Cleomenes, had been told repeatedly by the prophetess at Delphi that it was his divine duty to overthrow the tyranny of Athens. In 508, he roused himself and marched towards Athens at the head of a Spartan army.179

  The Delphic oracle was hardly unbiased (Athenian aristocrats, fleeing Hippias’s paranoia, had paid to build a gorgeous marble temple in place of the oracle’s old plain stone dwelling), and Cleomenes was likely not overwhelmed by a desire to see equality in Athens. In fact, the Spartan expansion across the center of the Peloponnese had produced a hugely unequal society. Native Spartan citizens were at the top. Beneath them lay a huge underclass of the conquered who could not be trusted as citizens: the helots, slaves and laborers. The Spartans liked it this way. The only equality in Sparta lay among male citizens over thirty, who were allowed to vote in the citywide assembly. Even there, Spartans were not permitted to debate. The airing of ideas was not considered useful in government. Young men spent their boyhoods, Plutarch tells us, trained into silent and ready obedience.18 Argument was no part of this training, which is why the old Greek name for the Spartans—the Lyconians—has given rise to our English word laconic.19

  Cleomenes’s march to Athens was impelled not by a love for equality, but by fear of the advancing Persian juggernaut. If Athens fell completely apart into squabbling factions, it would scarcely be able to resist the Persian march south, and Athens was the biggest barrier left between Sparta and Persia. Cleomenes hoped to drive Hippias out, stop the squabbling, and restore Athenian strength.

  The Spartan army chased Hippias out, and helped the Athenians hold elections. However, they refused to keep their fingers out of Athenian internal matters, and threw their weight behind one of the candidates.180 The Athenians, who saw in this a Spartan bid to fold Athens into its own orbit as a subject city, cast around for a powerful ally to help them against the dominant city of the south.

  Someone in the Assembly (Herodotus does not say who) suggested that Spartan arrogance could only be checked if the Athenians made an alliance with some overwhelmingly huge army…like that of the Persians. So off went a delegation to Sardis, to ask the governor there (Darius’s half-brother Artaphranes, who had been left in charge when Darius headed back to Persepolis) for an alliance against the Spartans.

  The Athenians seem to have overestimated their place in the international scene; this seemed like a perfectly reasonable proposal to them, but Herodotus writes that the delegation “was in the middle of delivering its message when Artaphrenes…asked the Athenians who they were and where they were from.” He undoubtedly knew the answer to this already, but this was a beautifully deflating inquiry, followed by a curt ultimatum: the Persians would only come to the aid of the Athenians if they agreed to send earth and water to Darius as a symbol of complete submission.

  The delegates, surrounded by Persians, agreed, which at least got them safely out of Sardis, although they had to face the music back in Athens: “This got them into a lot of trouble on their return home,” Herodotus remarks.20 The Athenians had no intention of giving up any of their liberties. Instead, they turned to tackle the Spartan problem on their own, and fought a damagingly fierce set of skirmishes to get the remaining armed Spartans out of their city.

  With the Spartans finally out of the picture, it took some time for the Athenians to reorder their tyrant-dominated government. When the dust cleared, the population had been divided into ten “tribes,” with tribal lines cutting across old family alliances in an attempt to destroy the ancient web of highborn power. The Council of Four Hundred became the Council of Five Hundred, with fifty representatives from each tribe. In a final effort to get rid of the dominance of aristocratic families, the city itself was then divided into thirty geographical units called demes, and the Athenians within each deme were ordered to use the name of the deme rather than their family names.18121 This was an interesting idea, but didn’t work particularly well; most Athenians eventually reverted to their old cognomens.

  A new custom was introduced as well. Any citizen of Athens could be exiled from the city, should six thousand of his compatriots write his name down on pieces of pottery which were used as ballots. The pottery shards were called ostraka, and from this the custom of ten-year exile became known as “ostracism.” It was yet another safeguard against tyranny: “Whenever someone…becomes greater in power than is appropriate…,” writes Aristotle, “such excessive superiority usually leads to one-man rule…. On account of this, some states have ostracism.”22

  According to Aristotle, the first Athenians to suffer ostracism were the friends of Hippias, who were forced to follow the ex-tyrant into exile.

  MEANWHILE another Greek city had also decided to ask the Persian armies for help.

  This was the Ionian city of Miletus, over on the edge of the Persian-ruled Asia Minor. The leader of Miletus was an ambitious warrior named Aristagorus, who had dominated his city as tyrant for years. Now he planned to cast his net wider. He went to the governor of Sardis and offered to conquer his way through the Greek islands called the Cyclades, all on behalf of Persia, if the Persians would just give him ships and soldiers.

  Artaphranes agreed to this plan, and Aristagorus, delighted with his chance to become the tyrant of a whole mini-empire of islands, put together an invading force and sailed to his first target, Naxos.

  Unfortunately the Greek city on Naxos proved impossible to break into. The inhabitants, rather than fighting, simply hauled all of their provisions inside the city and prepared to wait it out. After a four-month siege, Aristagorus had run out of Persian money, and Artaphranes, unimpressed with the tyrant’s skill in conquest, declined to throw any more at the project. Aristagorus was forced to sail back to Miletus with mud on his face, his ambitions thwarted.

  He had learned, however, from watching Greek politics from across the water; and, like any good Athenian politician, he switched his ground. He decided to switch his alliance from pro-Persian to anti-Persian, sheerly out of expedience. He would lead the Greek cities of Asia Minor in a rebellion against the Persian overlords; and perhaps, eventually, unite them behind his leadership.

  A few delicate inquiries showed him that other Ionian tyrants would undoubtedly be willing to join in a rebellion. But he had learned from his Naxos disaster that wars were expensive. He needed even more support to start a war against the Persians.

  The obvious first ally for such a project was the warlike Sparta. Sparta was the chief and most powerful city in a loose alliance of Greek city-states called the Peloponnesian League—an association formed for mutual defense against enemies. If Sparta joined the war against Persia, so would other cities in the League. So Aristagorus travelled to Sparta and called on Cleomenes. Cleomenes not only refused to prod the Persian beast with a pin; he first laughed at Aristagorus, and then had Aristagorus pitched out of his city by force.

  “After he had been thrown out of Sparta,” Herodotus writes, Aristagorus “chose to come to Athens, because after Sparta it was the most powerful Greek state.”23 Here, he found more receptive ears.

  Hippias, the expelled Athenian tyrant, was threatening to come back. He had fled Greece, crossed the Hellespont, and gone to the Persians in hopes that Persian armies might help him reconquer Athens. Artaphranes, listening to the plan, could see that Hippias would be the ideal Persian wedge into Greece. He sent a message to Athens, telling them to take Hippias back or suffer invasion; this message had just arrived when Aristagorus showed up, proposing rebellion.24

  Athens, indignant at this Persian ultimatum, agreed to send twenty ships to help with Aristagorus’s rebellion; its ally Eretria, on the coast, sent five.25 And so, in 500 BC, war began.

  THE WAR BETWEEN the Persians and the Greeks, which trailed on for a little more than twenty years, receives barely a mention in Persian histories. But in Greece, it was at the center of every man’s life, and at the edge of every woman’s, for
over two decades. Our accounts are all from Greeks: Herodotus, who was five years old when the war ended, but who interviewed eyewitnesses to reconstruct the events; Thucydides, born twenty or so years later, who made use of Herodotus’s accounts but corrected some of his interpretations based on other sources; and the Greek playwright Aeschylus, who was older than both the historians, and fought in the war himself. His play The Persians is the work of an eyewitness, but its spotlight is on Greek courage, not campaigns. 26 In the eyes of these men, the battles of the Persian Wars are central to the development of humanity. From the Persian point of view, they were small engagements which, when they went badly, were best ignored.

  The Ionian cities that joined the revolt began on a high note by commandeering three hundred ships from Darius’s navy, and staffing them with Greeks.27 Darius immediately sent his fast and well-trained army to put down the Ionian revolt. Before they could arrive, Aristagorus and his allies had managed to surprise Sardis and enter it. The royal governor Artaphranes shut himself safely into the citadel, but the Ionians spread all through Sardis, intending to loot it. Unfortunately, the city began to burn almost at once. A soldier had torched a single house, and since the buildings of Sardis were mostly made of reeds, the fire spread through the whole city.

  The “conflagration of Sardis,” as Herodotus calls it,28 made the Persians unredeemably angry. When the Persian and Ionian armies met up in Ephesus, the Ionians were thrashed. They scattered, and the Athenians, seeing that no good was going to come of this particular engagement, decided to go home. But the Ionians had no choice now but to keep on fighting. Burning Sardis was a point of no return. They could not now simply retreat without the most horrific consequences.

  They did take the fighting offshore, though. A joint Ionian navy went up through the Hellespont and drove the Persian garrison stationed at Byzantium out of the city. Then the ships sailed back down the coast, collecting allies as they went.29 The rebellion had grown strong enough to stalemate the Persians for years of weary fighting.

  The tide turned against the Ionian cities in 494, when a Persian fleet of six hundred ships came up against the Ionian ships in the open sea, just off the coast near Miletus. The Persians had been collecting themselves for a huge encounter, and they knew the Ionian fleet well; 300 of the 353 ships in the Greek fleet had been kidnapped from Darius’s navy at the beginning of the war.30

  Scores of Ionian-manned ships were sunk. As the battle turned against the Greeks, scores more simply deserted. The admiral of the Ionian fleet sailed off to Sicily and turned pirate (although he only raided Carthaginian and Etruscan ships, and “left Greek shipping alone”).31 Aristagorus himself fled Asia Minor entirely and went over to Thrace, where he was killed while trying to seize a Thracian city for his own.

  The victorious Persians landed on the coast at Miletus, the city of Aristagorus the troublemaker. They cut the city off from all outside aid, dug under the walls, and brought it down. “Most of the male population was killed,” Herodotus says, “their women and children…reduced to slavery…. Those who remained alive were taken to Susa.” Darius resettled them in the marshes at the mouth of the Tigris, the one-time home of the Chaldeans.32 The Athenians, watching from afar, were distraught, despite their position as noncombatants. Miletus had once been a daughter city of Athens, and its destruction was a wound to the Athenian body.

  Worse was to come. Darius had not forgotten the original Athenian and Eretrian participation in the rebellion. In 492, he put his general and son-inlaw Mardonius in charge of a two-pronged invasion force: a land force that would march through Asia Minor, across the Bosphorus on the pontoon bridge, and down through Thrace and Macedonia, and a naval force that would sail through the Aegean and meet the land force for an attack on the northern Greek cities.

  This first Persian foray into Greece was cut short. The Persian navy had almost reached its goal when a storm blew up and wrecked almost every ship on the rocks near Mount Athos. Without its planned reinforcements, the land force retreated.

  It took the Persian navy two years to rebuild. But by 490, the new fleet was ready to go, and Mardonius (who had been called back to Susa for reproof) was back on the job.

  Herodotus says that this second invasion force had six hundred ships; even if this is an exaggeration, the sea invasion was so enormous that the Persians did not bother to march a land force down to reinforce it. On one of the ships was Hippias, who had been promised that he could become the tyrant of Athens once more when the Persians had wiped out the opposition.

  The Persian soldiers began their sweep inland by destroying Naxos (Aristagorus had indeed been an incompetent general; the Persian forces overran Naxos in a matter of days) and then besieging Eretria. The next goal was Athens: the queen of Attica, the key to dominating the Greeks.

  The Eretrian defenses were gone. The Athenians, braced to face the Persian cataclysm, sent a messenger south to Sparta to beg for assistance. This messenger was Pheidippides, a “trained runner” by profession who is said to have covered the 140 miles between Sparta and Athens in barely twenty-four hours, an amazing feat of strength. (Likely Herodotus telescopes the time that the journey took, but there is no reason to doubt the distance covered.)182 But the Spartans refused to answer the call. They were celebrating a religious holiday, and could not begin a march until the full moon.

  The Spartans were a religious people (not to say superstitious), but it is very possible that they were attempting to avoid outright war with Persia. The Persians were arriving to punish Athens; their wrath was directed at those Greek cities which had joined in the Ionian rebellion, and the Spartans had declined.

  Meanwhile, the Athenians had no choice but to face the Persians without aid.

  Herodotus tells us that their commander, Miltiades, arranged the foot soldiers—the Athenian hoplites—in a slightly unusual formation, with a thin center line and massed troops on both wings. The hoplites were named after their shields, the Athenian hoplons, which had grips at the side rather than the center. The hoplon was designed to leave the right arm free for spear use, which meant that it exposed part of the user’s right-hand side, but it jutted out to the left far enough to cover the right side of the next hoplite over. It was, in other words, a style of armor that forced its users to stay in a tightly packed formation: the phalanx. A hoplite alone was terribly vulnerable. Only hoplites who remained jammed into the phalanx had a chance of survival.

  This coerced discipline, plus desperation, made up for the smaller Athenian numbers. “The Athenians,” Herodotus tells us, “charged the invaders at a run,” which made the Persians think that perhaps they had all gone mad.33 And in fact the Athenian center broke almost at once. The massed wings, though, pushed the Persians between them, until the invaders began to retreat out from the deathly space between the phalanxes. As they went backwards towards their ships, they stumbled into marshy ground, many of them bogging down, trapped by the weight of their armor.

  Many of the Persians made it back out to the ships and escaped. But the Athenians captured seven ships and killed a huge number of the invaders; Herodotus’s number of 6,400 Persian dead, as opposed to 192 Athenian casualties, is (like Henry V’s numbers at the Battle of Agincourt) a patriotic exaggeration. But the Battle of Marathon was a staggering victory for Athens. They had fought off the monster.

  The Spartans arrived in time to help count the dead.

  THE MEN who fought at Marathon were known later by the name Marathonomachoi, honored in Athens as World War II veterans have been in the United States for their role in freedom. Their victorious general Miltiades came to a thankless end, though, deprived of his command for failing to capture the island of Paros (which was Persian-loyal). He was brought to his trial suffering from a gangrenous wound received during the failed campaign, and died of it very shortly afterwards.

  Darius, meanwhile, was considering ways of renewing the war with Greece. In 486, four years after Marathon, he raised taxes, probably to rebuild the ar
my. Egypt rebelled almost at once, probably in reaction, but Darius had no time to deal with it. He grew ill in the fall of 486 and died before winter came.34

  His oldest son, Xerxes, took his place.

  Xerxes had been taking notes on his father’s career. Like Darius, he first sent his army to put down the opportunistic rebellions that always accompanied a change in the royal house. The inevitable revolt in Babylon he dealt with by dividing the city into two smaller satrapies, thus short-circuiting some of its factionalism. Egypt he reconquered by sheer force of arms, and then had his own title of “Lord of the Double Country” carved into inscriptions in both Egypt and Persia.35

  Then he turned his eyes back to Greece. By 484, ports all over his empire were building ships. Three hundred and twenty were manned by Greek mercenaries; two hundred came from Egypt. Egyptians also helped Xerxes to build another pontoon bridge, this one a little farther south than Darius’s; it stretched across the Hellespont and was held together by Egyptian flax ropes.36

  Meanwhile, Athens was building a fleet of triremes, long thin ships (around 120 feet long and only 15 feet wide) with room for 170 rowers, which meant they could knife through the water and ram other ships at high speed. In 481, Athens and thirty other cities joined together in a new league, the Hellenic League, formed specifically for the defense of Greece against the Persians. The Spartans, who had rejoined the anti-Persian cause, were the most experienced of the combined anti-Persian army.

  In the fall of that same year, Xerxes in person marched his troops to Sardis, where they wintered, building up their strength and recovering from the journey. Then, in the spring of 480, he led them across the Hellespont.

  The Greeks had little faith that the north would stand for very long. They established their front line of battle just below the Malian Gulf, with the army massed at Thermopylae, where the mountains divided to allow for passage. This was the only decent way for Xerxes to reach the southern part of the peninsula (although there was a hidden mountain road, which he was unlikely to discover). The navy was drawn up at the north end of Euboea.