by Tom Holland
Whose fury was naturally terrible. The Ionians, by raising the banner of democracy, had taken a fateful and perilous step. Having defied the orders of Darius' appointed satrap, and ousted the regimes he had imposed, they had effectively chosen to declare war on the King of Kings. In the first giddy flush of their liberty, this seemed barely to concern most of them. Aristagoras, however, knew better. He at any rate, had no illusions as to the scale of the challenge his countrymen now faced. A superpower such as Persia was not lightly challenged; Artaphernes' desire for revenge was sure to prove swift and devastating. If the rebellious cities - and their dreams - were not to be crushed utterly, they would need, at the barest minimum, not merely a united front but an effective fleet and allies too.
But how to secure them? Aristagoras' fertile mind was already cooking up any number of hopeful plots. The first was particularly audacious. One of his agents, pretending to be an officer loyal to Artaphernes, coolly sailed into the port some miles north of Miletus
where the Persian navy was docked, rounded up all the Ionians serving there as admirals, and proceeded to sail off to Miletus with the fleet.11 It was a daring and spectacular triumph — and encouraged Aristagoras to embark on a secret mission of his own. In the winter of 499 bc, he boarded a warship and glided out from the great harbours of his city. Across the bay to the north of Miletus he could see a great spine of rock, the ridge of Mount Mycale, rising above the sea. This was where the Greeks of Asia, in happier times, had been accustomed to meet to celebrate their common bonds, at the sanctuary of the 'Panionium' — 'the shrine of all the Ionians'. There would be opportunity enough, perhaps, for councils of war there, for assemblies of generals, and the plotting of strategy — but not now. Aristagoras had other, more pressing business. Onwards he sailed. Mount Mycale and then, just beyond its westernmost tip, the island of Samos both began to fade over the horizon. Ahead lay the open sea — and the currents that led to Greece.
A Low, Dishonest Decade
499 bc. Winter in Lacedaemon. Just offshore from Gythion, the small port which served the Spartans as their naval base, the islet of Cranae was windswept and deserted; and yet it bore, for all who gazed at it, indelible associations of summer heat and blazing stars. There it was, beneath the open sky, that Helen and Paris had spent their first night together, an entwined delirium of passion that had led, in short time, to a conflagration engulfing both East and West, and Spartan warships ploughing the waters off Troy. A promising omen? Aristagoras, gazing at the notorious island as his ship pulled into Gythion, would certainly have hoped so. His mission was nothing less than to recruit the Spartans to a second great Asian war.
Taking the thirty-mile road that led to their city, Aristagoras rehearsed the incentives that he would dangle before his hosts. The Persians were rich beyond the dreams of avarice; they were perfumed and effeminate; why, 'they even fought in trousers'. Could any foe be more tempting? Particularly since the Spartans had, in one of their kings, a leader with a proven relish for launching pre-emptive strikes. Cleomenes, even after the debacle at Eleusis, still stood unchallenged as the strongman of Sparta. Demaratus, the colleague whose agitation had done so much to abort the Athenian campaign, had been decisively shoved back in his place. Returning from Attica, Cleomenes had openly accused his fellow monarch of sabotaging the war effort, and pressured the Spartan assembly to pass a law forbidding both kings ever again to go on the same campaign. His rival was effectively confined to barracks. Indeed, the wretched Demaratus was left so thoroughly in the shade that he had been reduced to the desperate straits of entering a chariot at the Olympic Games; worse, when he won he had actually boasted about his victory. If this was vulgar behaviour for any Spartan, it was unheard of for a king.
But Cleomenes too, still bore scars from the Athenian misadventure. When he met Aristagoras to discuss the crisis in Ionia, the Spartan commander-in-chief astonished his guest by flatly turning down his appeal for aid. Assuming that he was being stung for a bribe, Aristagoras followed Cleomenes home, proffering ever higher figures as he did so. Not even the presence of the king's eight-year-old daughter, Gorgo, served to inhibit him — a major oversight, in view of the priggishness conditioned from a tender age into Spartan girls. 'Daddy,' the bright-eyed Gorgo piped up suddenly, 'this foreigner is out to corrupt you. Leave him well alone!'15 A display of precocious rectitude to thrill her father's heart; but Cleomenes, even had his daughter not been there to hold him to the straight and narrow, would surely still have sent Aristagoras packing. The taste of the Athenian debacle was still too bitter in his mouth. Worse, there were reports from the north that the Argives, the old enemy, were regrouping, plotting yet another showdown. The Spartans would need all their reserves of manpower to deal with the looming crisis. Cleomenes had not the slightest intention of diverting a single hoplite overseas.
Which is not to say that he was contemptuous of the Persian threat. By now a seasoned strategist, Cleomenes could certainly recognise a threat to Sparta in the growing scale of the Great King's ambitions. But not to Sparta alone - nor even pre-eminently. Watching the disconsolate Aristagoras leave Lacedaemon, Cleomenes would have had a shrewd idea as to his next port of call. The Ionians, that winter, were not the only rebels against the Great King. A city of them was to be found in Greece, too. The Athenians, having sought Persian assistance against Cleomenes back in 507 bc, had come bitterly to regret their gift of earth and water. In what Cleomenes himself could only regard as the most exquisite poetic justice, Artaphernes, that instinctive tyrant-sponsor, had ordered the Athenians to take back Hippias, the exiled Pisistratid. The Athenians, naturally, had refused. As a result, from that moment on, to all intents and purposes they had been at war with Persia. Who was Cleomenes, of all people, to bail out the Athenians? Their mess: their problem. And when, as he was sure they would, they answered Aristagoras' appeal by sending a task force to Ionia, they would be running risks, and suffering casualties, and probing the Persians' strength as proxies of Spartan intelligence.
A fact of which the more calculating of the Athenians were uncomfortably aware. Wise heads among the aristocracy, alert to the vastness of Persian power and practised in realpolitik, listened to Aristagoras and his war-mongering with horror; but it was not the aristocracy who ruled the Assembly now. The Athenian people, eager to pay back Artaphernes for ever having received their submission, buoyed by the idea of making cause with their kinsmen across the sea, and intoxicated by the prospect of easy loot, voted enthusiastically to send a fleet of twenty ships to join the assault on Persia. War fever, as Aristagoras jovially pointed out, was an intoxication to which democracies appeared peculiarly prone. After all, 'where he had failed with Cleomenes, a single individual, he had now succeeded with the Athenians, an assembly of thirty thousand'.16
Unfortunate for him, then, and for the Ionians, that there were no other democracies on hand. Indeed, aside from Eretria, a merchant-port on the island of Euboea which had long felt its interests threatened by Persia, Athens was the only city in the whole of Greece to swallow
Aristagoras' patter. But this sobering statistic, far from giving her citizens pause for thought, served only to fuel their already shining sense of exceptionalism and mission. In the spring of 498 bc, democracy's first ever task force duly slid out of the harbour of Phalerum. Heading eastwards along the Attic coastline, it was soon joined from the north by five ships from Eretria, and then, prows pointed boldly towards Ionia, sailed onwards and out of the Athenians' sight. Not out of mind, however. Wherever the Athenian people gathered together that early summer, whether in the bars of the Ceramicus, in the Agora or down in Phalerum, news was feverishly awaited. Weeks passed. Then, at last, news began to filter through. The soldiers of the democracy were reported to have scored a glorious success. Disdaining to cower and skulk on the Ionian coast, they had dared instead to strike directly at the heart of Artaphernes' power. Marching with their Ionian and Eretrian allies over the mountains that guarded Sardis, they had followed secret
, winding paths, and then, taking the Persians wholly by surprise, had descended suddenly into the plain. Artaphernes had been sent scampering into his palace. The lower city had been burned. A Persian expedition against Miletus had been forced to turn round. Athens had done her duty; and the Ionians, thanks to her heroic efforts, had surely now been freed for good.
Mission accomplished'. So it might have seemed. It did not take long, however, for the sunny news from Ionia to darken. Yes, Artaphernes had holed up in his palace; but the Greeks, few in number and lacking siege engines, had failed miserably to breach its formidable walls. Nor, with fire blazing through the lower town, had they been able to preserve the temple of Cybele from the inferno. This sacrilege was so fearful that the Greeks, already dispirited by their failure to capture Artaphernes, had promptly retreated to the mountains. Stumbling wearily back to the sea, they had then found themselves shadowed by squads of Persian horsemen. Barely a mile from their ships, they had been forced to turn and make a stand. 'Easily beatable':17 this was how Aristagoras had repeatedly described the Persians during the course of his shuttle diplomacy. Now, wilting beneath a hail of their arrows, choking on dust-clouds raised by their tireless cavalry, the Athenians had discovered the baneful truth. The Greek line, bronze-clad though it was, had begun to break. The Eretrian commander, struggling to hold it together, had been killed. The Athenian survivors, separated from the main body of the Greek army, had straggled back to their ships, hoisted their sails and fled.
Greeting the return of the broken fleet with alarmed perplexity, their fellow citizens could at last appreciate that Aristagoras had fed them a con. The Ionian's claim that the Persians were womanish and feeble stood exposed as the product of wishful thinking. The Athenian Assembly, veering wildly from jingoism to funk, dismissed all further appeals from the war zone, frantic though these were, and bitter with reproach. Indeed, having originally sold Athens a false prospectus, Aristagoras could now point to some genuine successes; for the burning of Sardis, although it had struck the Athenians as a disaster, had blazed the news of Persian humiliation far and wide. From Cyprus to the Chersonese, the sparks of rebellion were bursting into flames, and Artaphernes, his prestige badly damaged, was finding the task of stamping them out a desperate one.
The Athenians, however, with the obduracy of born-again isolationists, remained resolutely unimpressed. It appeared clear to them now, from the brief glimpse of Persian power that their expedition had afforded, that all Aristagoras' schemes and ambitions were merely so many castles built of air. Most ominously, as they had found out for themselves, the Ionian hoplites simply had no answer to the range and speed of the Persian cavalry — so much so that by the summer of 497 bc, barely two years into the revolt, the rebels had all but been swept into the sea. Only Miletus, birthplace of the insurgency, still held out; and although the Ionian fleet remained unconquered, there were no supplies or fresh recruits to be had from the waves. So grim did the situation appear that Aristagoras, despairing of the Athenians, decided to take a leaf out of his uncle's book and travel to Myrcinus, Histiaeus' private fiefdom in Thrace, to secure fresh timber for the fleet and silver for mercenaries. The natives, however, proved even less supportive of the war-effort than the Athenians had been: far from welcoming their landlord, they opted instead to make their own bid for freedom, and knifed him dead. So, squalidly and obscurely, perished Aristagoras, instigator of the great revolt against the King of Kings - and the one man to have provided it with genuine leadership and purpose.
The Ionians' hope of victory, already flickering, now began to dim to the point of near-extinction. It would take the Persians, labouring hard to rebuild the fleet stolen from them at the beginning of the revolt, another three years before they felt ready to challenge the rebels for control of the sea. Yet, during that time, with Aristagoras dead, and no one stepping forward to replace him, the Ionians' war effort appeared struck by paralysis, as though with horror at the catastrophe they knew was surely nearing. Faction-leader turned against faction-leader; class against class; city against city. More lethal in its effects than any number of cavalry squadrons, Persian gold began to do its work. Defeatists and appeasers flaked away. Still the Ionian fleet, moored along the islands off embattled Miletus, held to its position, more than 350 battleships, a fearsome number, save that as they rotted in the storms of winter and steamed in the summer heat they began to reek of dread and desperation, a stench that hung menacingly in the air, and reached as far as a fretful Athens.
For there, with the dual realisations that any bulwark the Ionians might have given them was surely doomed, and that the far-seeing and pitiless eye of the King of Kings would soon be fixed unblinkingly on their city, the Athenians were panicking, too. The ebullient self-confidence that had swept the democracy to its first intoxicating victories was already fading fast. Defeat in Ionia was not the only bloody nose that the Athenians had recently been given. For a whole decade now, they had found themselves embroiled in a bothersome war with the small but tormentingly energetic island of Aegina, a nest, as the Athenians saw it, of pirates and scavengers, and one that stood infuriatingly only fifteen miles south of Salamis, in the heart of the Saronic Gulf — directly astride their shipping lanes. Guided in her policy as she was by landowners, instinctive lubbers with their roots in the soil, Athens had never thought to build herself a navy. Nor, despite the relentless buzzing of Aeginetan privateers, did she think to do so now. Who, after all, was going to stump up the cash? Not the poor, self-evidently; and certainly not the rich, who took it for granted that they should stand and fight with shield and spear on dry land, as men of their background, men who could afford decent armour, had always done. Yet this disdain for seapower, although it certainly helped to preserve the hoplite class from the indignity of having to grunt and sweat at an oar, did not contribute greatly to the war effort against Aegina. Indeed, such was the Athenians' impotence against enemy raids that they were forced, on one occasion, to watch helplessly as their whole harbour went up in flames. True, the wide bay of Phalerum was not easily defended; nor were the Aeginetan pirates in any position to challenge Athens by land; but the fact that the war was a nuisance rather than a terminal menace in no way diminished the democracy's sudden sense of drift. One question, in particular, could hardly fail to trouble the voters. If thev found it impossible to defeat a tiny pinprick of an island just off their coast, what hope would thev have against the righteous fury of a superpower?
As the storm clouds of seeming Persian invincibility loomed ever darker over Ionia, so strange shadows from the past returned to haunt Athens, too. In the summer of 496 bc, the Athenian people elected as their head of state a man whose very name appeared to hint at an imminent climbdown from liberty. Hipparchus was not merely the son of a prominent Pisistratid minister, but had even married his sister to Hippias, the exiled tyrant. The ideal candidate, perhaps, to open channels to his brother-in-law, negotiate favourable terms with Artaphernes, and secure a pardon for the burning of Sardis from the Great King. In the event, the democracy stood firm: despite all the continuing bad news from the Ionian front, Hipparchus served out his year of office without engaging in active collaboration. Yet the temptations of surrender, which the peace party naturally preferred to term realism, continued to gnaw away. Rumours of treachery — of
'medising' — swirled through the city; and inevitably, as they had done for a century, the darkest suspicions of all attached themselves to those champion opportunists, the Alcmaeonids. Cleisthenes may have been the patron of democracy, but few doubted that his clan, given sufficient incentive, would opt to sell it out. That nothing was ever proved against them served only to fuel the democracy's paranoia. The Great King's gold was surely flowing somewhere, somehow, into Athens. If not to an Alcmaeonid, then to somebody else. Politician kept suspicious eye on politician, tracked the news from Ionia with growing foreboding, and manoeuvred for advantage.
To the Eupatrids, of course, this was an old game. Appeasement came n
aturally to them. As in Ionia, so in Athens, the aristocracy had long affected a faddish Orientalism. The notion that they should risk the obliteration of their city rather than arrive at an accommodation with the all-powerful King of Kings was hardly one that they could be expected to embrace. Enthusiasts for the new political order, realising this and marking the pall of black smoke that hung over Ionia, came increasingly to mistrust the old elite and to doubt their loyalties. Admittedly, not all Eupatrids could necessarily be regarded as collaborators in waiting: Miltiades, for instance, grandest of the grand though he was, had been an active freedom-fighter in the Chersonese since the very start of the lonians' great revolt. But even he ruled his fiefdom as a tvrant: not much of a recommendation to those in Athens growing nervous for their democracy.
Where, then, could they look for leadership; Perhaps to a new generation of politician, and a new breed. One not unsettled by the talk of people power, as the scions of the great families were, but inspired by it instead. Revolution, so alarming to the Eupatrid elite, appeared to promise rare opportunities to talented citizens on the make. Barely a decade into the life of the democracy, for instance, a young man by the name of Themistocles could credibly set his eyes on the supreme office in Athens, the archonship, despite coming from a family with no obvious political pedigree at all. Though of aristocratic birth, his father had never shown the slightest interest in holding public office; his mother — horror of horrors — was not even Athenian-born. In an earlier and more chauvinistic age, a misfortune of this order would have been sufficient to deny Themistocles his citizenship altogether; only Cleisthenes' reforms and the need to pad out the ten tribes with a full complement of able bodies had ensured a change to the law. As a result, Themistocles' sense of loyalty towards the new order was of a peculiarly personal nature — and left him hankering after public office rather as a man in a delirium might crave a cure. Themistocles had recognised, with the instinctive cynicism that would always mark his love affair with celebrity, that in a state run by the people there could be only one certain gauge of fame. 'How can you rate me,' he would ask his friends, 'when I have not yet made anyone jealous:'18 The horizons opened up by the new order glimmered before him as a kind of agony.