The First Clash

by Jim Lacey

  When the Samian fleet alerted its former tyrant that it was ready to desert, the Persians considered their work done. They sailed out to offer battle under the command of a Persian officer named Datis, who later commanded the Persian forces at Marathon, with a rising star, Mardonius, as his second in command. The 353 ships of the Greek fleet were waiting in a line that must have extended almost two miles. Aligned on the eastern wing, close to their own city, were the 80 ships of the Milesians. To their right were ships from Priene, followed in order by Myous, Teos, Chios, Erythrai, Phocaea, and Lesbos and with those of Samos anchoring the west wing.

  As the battle lines closed, disaster struck. The Samians set their sails and made for home, using the same wind propelling the Persians forward to make good their escape. The Lesbians, seeing their flanks exposed by the Samians’ treachery, also set their sails and escaped.24 The remaining Greeks were doomed. Still, they fought hard and died hard, with the Chians particularly distinguishing themselves.

  In the aftermath of battle, the Greek survivors made land at Ephesus, where the locals supposedly mistook them for raiders bent on seizing Ephesian women. Showing a ferocity they never displayed against the Persians, the Ephesian men sallied forth to slaughter the exhausted Chian crews. Interestingly, the Ephesians did not send any ships to join the Ionian fleet at Lade. It just might be that they had already made a deal with the Persians and thought that killing the Chian crews would gain them further favor with Darius. The tale of their mistakenly killing the Chians because they believed them to be raiders may then be considered a cover story created for a time when it was no longer wise to admit they had helped the Persians. Herodotus does report that the Greek commander, Dionysius, broke through the Persian battle line and with three ships eventually escaped to Sicily. Here he turned to a life of piracy but refused to plunder Greek shipping, opting to grow rich attacking only Carthaginian and Etruscan vessels.

  The rest of the Ionian war is easily summed up. Miletus was taken by storm. As the leading city of the revolt, it was treated particularly harshly, and the majority of the inhabitants were either slaughtered or enslaved.25 After Miletus’s fall, all that was left for the Persians were mopping-up operations. In short order, each of the remaining Ionian cities either surrendered or fell by storm. At first, the Persians made good on their threats and enacted a policy of terror. According to Herodotus:

  For after they had completed the conquest of the cities, they picked out the most handsome boys and castrated them, making them eunuchs instead of males. And they dragged off the most beautiful virgins to the King. After they had carried out these threats, they also set fire to the cities and to their sanctuaries, too. Thus the Ionians were reduced to slavery for the third time, the first being at the hands of the Lydians, and then twice in succession by the Persians.26

  Later tradition probably exaggerated the reprisals (except possibly in the case of Miletus), as in a very short time a level of normalcy returned. Just fourteen years later, Darius’s successor, Xerxes, was confident enough of Ionian loyalty to place substantial levies on them for participation in the great invasion of Greece in 480 BC. In 492 BC, the Ionians must have been shocked when a new Persian military commander, Mardonius, the second in command at the Battle of Lade, replaced the recently reinstalled Ionian tyrants with democracies.27 It is worth noting that these were democracies that were ruled by a king and his provincial governors. In this regard, they would be akin to the local democracies China allows many towns and cities, where voters are given a choice among various Communist Party members. Many times in history, appearance trumps reality. The Ionians may have been pleased with the appearance of democracy, but no one doubted who was truly running things.

  Mardonius had under his command a new army, probably raised in the expectation that the Ionian revolt would continue another year, as well as numerous veterans of the earlier fighting who had not wished to be demobilized yet.28 He took this army to the Hellespont and crossed into Thrace, which had broken away from Persian control during the Ionian revolt. The going was easy at first, and most of the cities and tribes in the region submitted without offering any resistance, including the Macedonians, who became, Herodotus says contemptuously, “slaves of the Persians.”29 Greek tradition says that Mardonius’s true plan was to march into Greece in order to undertake the punishment of Eretria and Athens and that this aim was thwarted only by twin disasters that befell him in the fall of 492 BC.

  While Mardonius’s fleet was sailing around the treacherous waters of Mount Athos, a northeasterly gale struck it, wrecking three hundred ships and drowning many of their crews.30 This disaster was followed by defeat on land, when his army was set upon by an unconquered Thracian tribe—the Byrogi—while it was encamped in Macedonia. According to Herodotus, the Byrogi “slaughtered many of them [Persians] and wounded Mardonius himself.” It is likely that later Greek tradition magnified both of these disasters. Even Herodotus states that Mardonius did not leave the region until he had killed many of the Byrogi and enslaved the rest.31 Given the lateness of the season, it would appear unlikely that Mardonius ever contemplated an invasion of Greece, and there is certainly no evidence that he had made any preparations to do so. The Greeks may have felt threatened by a large army so close to their northern borders, but it seems clear that Mardonius’s only mission was to enforce Persian power in the lands that had previously submitted. In this, he thoroughly succeeded.

  But Darius had not forgotten the insult that Athens and Eretria had offered him. All along the coast of the empire, ports were alive with shipbuilding activities, for Darius had ordered the construction of a great fleet, including special transports for his cavalry. Alongside this construction, the Persian general Datis began to gather the battle-hardened veterans of the Ionian revolt and Mardonius’s expedition. As this irresistible force assembled, Darius sent forth his envoys to demand the tokens of submission from the Aegean islands and the Greek mainland cities. The answers came back: Many had submitted and sent back earth and water to Darius.

  Sparta and Athens killed the Persian envoys.32 For them, it would be war.

  Chapter 12

  SPARTA SAVES GREECE

  After the Athenians abandoned their early intervention in the Ionian revolt, both they and the Spartans adamantly refused all entreaties to send reinforcements to their beleaguered Greek brethren. The ancient sources never make clear why both cities refused this aid, when it was obvious that the next object of Persian attention would be Greece proper. What appears to have happened is that the Spartans, deterred by the very size of the Persian Empire, refused to consider dispatching their army for a ninety-day march into Asia’s hinterlands. As for Athens, there were many in the city who had always opposed an overt anti-Persian policy, and with the ruin of the first expedition, after torching Sardis, this party was in the ascendancy.

  No doubt both reasons played a role in Athens’s and Sparta’s decisions to keep their armies close to home. However, there were more pressing reasons. For Sparta, the failure to rally its Peloponnesian allies for the attack on Athens years before was not just a diplomatic setback; it was a warning. Argos, Sparta’s ancient and most dangerous rival in the Peloponnesus, was again on the rise, and it was beginning to flex its muscle. As long as the other cities in the Peloponnesus could turn to Argos for support and protection, they would always be able to thwart Spartan desires. Corinth made this explicit in 431 BC at the start of the Peloponnesian War, but it must have been a strong, if unspoken, factor in 496 BC, when the allies stood together and defied Spartan wishes. It was obvious to Cleomenes that if Spartan supremacy was to be made real, Sparta would have to humble Argos again, and it would have to be done with a purely Spartan army. As for Athens, it had troubles of its own. Thebes and Chalcis had sued for peace, but Aegina was still prosecuting its war against Athens. The Athenians could have dealt with Aegina, and would later do so decisively, but with a restive Thebes to the north and Spartan intentions uncertain, it could not focus on
its immediate enemy. Moreover, Aegina was the preeminent naval power in the region, and it would be another decade before Athens could afford to assemble a fleet powerful enough to contest the seas.

  The Persians were certainly aware of these Greek conflicts, and they were quick to employ their established diplomatic practice of playing potential foes off against one another during the run-up to war. In fact, Aegina was to offer earth and water and become a Persian ally in the year before the Battle of Marathon, and Argos (along with Thebes) Medized during the Persian invasion of 480 BC. As both Athens and Sparta understood the magnitude of the Persian forces that would march on Greece as soon as they had subdued Ionia, it was imperative for them to put their own houses in order. The odds of defeating the Persian Empire already appeared slim, but they would be much worse if the Spartan and Athenian hoplites also had to worry about being stabbed in the back by another Greek city. They needed to clear the decks before the Persian onslaught. It was at this point that Sparta made its great contribution to Greek independence.1

  It had been fifty years since the Spartans and Argives had fought the Battle of the 300 Champions, which had led to a general engagement of both cities’ main armies. This had resulted in the breaking of Argos as a military power and the ceding of Thyrea to Sparta. Argos had spent the intervening five decades restoring its military power, and by 494 BC it felt ready once again to contest Sparta for supremacy of the Peloponnesus. In keeping with Spartan tradition and piety, Cleomenes consulted the oracle at Delphi on the advisability of attacking Argos. For once, the notoriously ambiguous oracle was the model of clarity: Cleomenes would defeat Argos.2

  In 494 BC, Cleomenes once again led the Spartan army out on campaign.3 This time, there was no call for the Peloponnesian allies to come to Sparta’s aid. Sparta would deal with this affair on its own. Cleomenes led the army to the banks of the Erasinos River, approximately three miles south of Argos, where he found the Argive hoplites massed, prepared to contest his crossing. Cleomenes ordered a sacrifice and the omens read. However, these were not found favorable, and Cleomenes was informed that the river would not care to be crossed at present. To this he responded, “How patriotic of it.”4

  Although he was reluctant to test the omen and tempt the fates, he was not ready to give up the campaign. In fact, Cleomenes appears to have been prepared to find the direct route to Argos barred to him. As the Argives, sheltering behind the Erasinos, had no knowledge of these bad omens, they remained at their posts as Cleomenes marched his army away from the Erasinos to the coast of Thyrea. Here, Aeginetan and Sicyonian vessels waited to ferry the Spartans across the gulf to Nauplia and into the rear of the Argive army. That the Spartans had massed these ships exactly where Cleomenes needed them indicates that this was a well-thought-out campaign many months or years in the planning. It also demonstrates that the march to the Erasinos may have been a feint, designed to draw the Argives away from the true direction of the Spartan attack. In this case, one may infer that Cleomenes might well have paid for the omens he desired, although that would go against what we know of Spartan piety.

  When news of the Spartan landing reached the Argives, they force marched to Tiryns and deployed at Sepeia. For several days, the armies watched each other without engaging, until Cleomenes noticed the Argives had entered into a routine he could exploit. Day after day, both armies stood to arms from daybreak until the noon meal (there was no breakfast). Cleomenes noted that the Argives soon began mimicking his army and were using Spartan bugle calls to alert them when the Spartan army was about to break for the day. When Spartan bugles called for assembly, the Argives assembled and stood to, and when the bugles announced dinner, the Argives broke ranks and ate, just as the Spartans were doing. On the appointed day, Cleomenes had the bugles blow assembly as usual. All day, both armies baked in the hot sun as gleaming ranks faced each other. When the appointed hour arrived, the Spartan bugles made the meal call. Both armies began to break up and go to eat. But without warning or any signal, the Spartans hastily re-formed and advanced. Caught unprepared, the Argives could not reassemble their phalanx and were crushed.

  Plutarch presents a different version. According to him, the Argives had asked for and received a seven-day armistice, but on the third night of that truce, the Spartans attacked. When someone later reproached Cleomenes for this violation of an oath, he said that he had made a truce for days but had said nothing about nights.5 In this same passage, when asked why he had not slaughtered all the people of Argos, Cleomenes replied, “Oh, we will not kill them off, for we want to have some left for our young men to train on.”6

  The Argive survivors retreated into the sacred Grove of Argos, where the pious Spartans refused to follow. Instead, they blockaded the grove, and at length Cleomenes inquired of several deserters the names of some of the Argives huddled in the forest. He then had heralds call into the forest the names of these men, informing them that their ransom had been paid and they were free to go. As each emerged, the Spartans murdered him. Approximately fifty Argives met this gruesome end before the Argives discovered what was happening and refused to emerge from the forest. At his wits’ end, Cleomenes ordered helots traveling with the army to pile brush around the grove and set it afire. In this way, any guilt (and accompanying curses) for the sacrilege of burning down a sacred grove would fall on the helots, not on the Spartans. When the hideous deed was done, some six thousand Argive hoplites had perished in the battle and fire. Sparta had broken Argive power. The city would not assert itself again for over a generation.

  Sparta was now undisputed master of the Peloponnesus and the dominant military power in Greece. In acknowledgment of this fact, Athens in 491 BC sent envoys to Sparta to request help with their problems with Aegina.7 By this time, Aegina was a member of the Peloponnesian League, as evidenced by its contribution of ships to assist Cleomenes’ end run around the Argive army. However, it was also a trading city, with substantial interests along the coasts of the Persian Empire. Thus, when Darius’s heralds arrived in the wake of the Ionian revolt’s collapse, demanding earth and water, Aegina submitted. By now, the Athenians had become convinced that Mardonius’s march through Thrace, in the wake of Ionia’s defeat, was a prelude to a Persian descent on Greece. Even though that expedition had met with disaster off Mount Athos, the Athenians were acutely aware that Persia was already constructing a fleet and assembling an army in Ionia aimed directly at them. As far as they could see, Aegina’s submission meant the Aeginetans planned to stab them (and Greece) in the back as they confronted the Persian foe. Even the Spartans became worried about Aegina’s intentions, and Cleomenes decided it needed to be coerced back into line.

  On his own (probably with his elite bodyguard), he went to Aegina and demanded hostages to ensure its good conduct. However, his co-king, Demaratus, once again wrecked his plans. He sent a message to Aegina’s leader, Krios, that he did not support Cleomenes’ action. Here we are left to wonder whether Demaratus hated Cleomenes so much that he would oppose any policy his co-king offered. Assuming he was a loyal Spartan, the only other explanation is that he believed Sparta could not stand against Persia’s might.8 Whatever his reasons, he succeeded in pulling the rug out from under Cleomenes. Krios asked if he had the full support of the other Spartans or if he was acting in this fashion because Athens had bribed him with silver. Lacking support at home and with few troops, Cleomenes gave up. But before leaving, he told Krios (which means “ram”), in a play on his name, “to gild his horns and enjoy his moment.” In religious rites, the Greeks gilded a sacrificial ram’s horns just prior to leading the animal to slaughter. Humiliated once again through the actions of Demaratus, Cleomenes returned to Sparta in a rage, determined to have Demaratus deposed.

  When Demaratus was born, his father, Ariston, was told of the birth while meeting with the ephors. After counting out the months of his marriage on his fingers, he swore an oath: “He could not be my son.” Later he decided the birth had been premature, but the seeds of dou
bt were planted. Now, Cleomenes used that doubt to claim Demaratus was not a rightful king. In this he received the assistance of Leotychidas, who was next in line for the throne and had other reasons to detest Demaratus.9 At trial, Leotychidas both prosecuted the case and swore an oath that Demaratus was not the true son of Ariston. When the trial ended, the Spartans remained undecided. At Cleomenes’ suggestion, they sent emissaries to consult the oracle at Delphi. Here, Cleomenes had already prepared the ground, so he was not surprised when the oracle proclaimed that Demaratus was not the son of Ariston. With that, the Spartans deposed Demaratus. Soon thereafter, after suffering intolerable taunts from Leotychidas, Demaratus left Sparta and took up residence in the Persian court. When he is next heard from, he is accompanying Xerxes as an adviser during the invasion of 480 BC.10