While the Athenians heralded Marathon as the greatest victory in history, in Persia the response to the battle was scorn and disdain. So what if those servants of the Lie had managed to wriggle out of their punishment? The Great King had lost a small border skirmish, true, but Eretria had been punished for her actions (the Greeks were resettled north of Basra) and the cause of Ahura-Mazda and Truth had been advanced far across the Aegean. And, of course, in an empire held together by fear of the power of the Great King, one could hardly make a defeat well-known. Thus, Darius counted the expedition a success.
Nevertheless, one could not let such an insult as the Athenians had given Persia stand. And so Darius began preparations for a new expedition, one much grander in scope than Datis’s punitive foray. Men and arms began gathering from all corners of the empire, in numbers so high that it was said there was no number great enough in the human language to encompass them all. The object of this expedition? To conquer and subjugate all Greece.
However, it was not to be. In 486, after three years of preparation, Egypt suddenly rose in revolt against Darius. This, the rebellion of a rich and prosperous province near the heart of the empire, was far more serious than a minor border war, and so the men who thought they would be marching on Greece found themselves duly diverted to the south, into another Egyptian campaign.
It was at this time that Darius, an old man by now, who had long been ill, at last died. He had a good reign. In the 35 years since he and his six conspirators had assassinated Bardiya and seized the throne, Darius had created the best organization of any empire yet. Roads linked all the far-flung provinces together. The Persian bureaucracy, overseeing the government of the 20 satrapies of the empire, was unrivalled. Peace, order, and stability were the watchwords of the day.
Indeed, nothing became Darius’s reign so much as the smooth manner in which it ended, a stark contrast to the violent manner of its birth. Thirty years before, a succession dispute between two brothers and a war in Egypt had brought one line of kings to extinction. But Darius, who had many sons, suffered no such problems with his succession. Each could look forward to a juicy satrapy to rule upon his death, and for the most worthy, there was the prize of the throne itself. Thus did the Crown Prince Xerxes, the best and brightest of the children of Darius, become King of Kings.
Xerxes, after suppressing the Egyptian revolt and then a second one that broke out in Babylon upon his succession, began once more to resume preparations for the campaign in Europe. He consulted with his generals deep within his capital. Mardonius, who, after the death of Datis at Marathon was the senior Persian commander, argued that a small, elite force of troops would suffice, one that could move fast and hit hard. Militarily, this may have been so, but politically, how could the King of Kings ride to war without the full might of his empire at his back? No, any army that marched would have to be suitable to the dignity of the King of Persia. It would have to draw forces from all corners of the empire, be fantastically large and magnificent. And so the army began to gather in Susa once more.
Xerxes could command not only men, however, but also could reshape the very land and sea to suit the needs of his army. At the Hellespont, the narrow band of water that separated Europe from Asia, pontoons, earth, and plants were thrown down to create a bridge of land for the army to cross. At Mt. Athos, where a storm had wrecked the Persian fleet and ruined Mardonius’s first expedition a decade before, a great work was taken up. A massive canal was dug right across the heart of the peninsula, so that the Persian ships would not be forced to circle the dangerous peninsula. Not even the elements would be allowed to stop the Great King this time.
In the meantime, the democracy in Athens continued its turbulent evolution. The unruly mob was distrustful of all men with undue influence, temperamental, and quick to judge. Being popular one day was no guarantee one would even be allowed within the city the next.
Miltiades, the hero of Marathon, didn't last long. In the aftermath of the great victory, he had agitated for an attack on the islands of the Aegean, to secure the Athenian frontiers. His siege was a shambles, however, and Miltiades himself was wounded. Upon his return, his political opponents gleefully accused him of a treason, and the Assembly quickly convicted him. His sentence of death was commuted to a heavy fine in recognition of his service and his wound, but that mattered little, as Miltiades would die of gangrene from his wound before it could be imposed.
With his exit from the scene, the struggle for control of Athens intensified as ambitious men made use
of the open playing field. And so the Athenians developed a…unique system of dealing with men they found overly threatening: Once a year, within the Assembly, each man would write the name of one prominent politician on a pottery shard, or ostraka. The unfortunate winner of the most votes would then be given ten days to leave Attica, or face the loss of all his property. He would remain “ostracized,” as the Athenians called it, for ten years.
And so one by one, the jealous Athenians, mistrustful of anyone with too much power, ostracized Pisistratids, Alcaemonids, Philiads – no one was safe from the verdict of the ostraka. And in the new, open environment, there was room for a man of suitable ambition and talent to make a name for himself.
Eventually, these men, the first politicians, coalesced into two factions, each around a hero of Marathon: One, the radical faction centered itself on a gifted orator named Themistocles. The other, a conservative coalition of the hoplite farmers who had won Marathon advanced as their champion a stolid old warrior named Areistides, called “the Just” by his supporters. Both, if you will recall, had fought in the dangerous center of the phalanx at Marathon. Now these allies were political rivals.
In 483, as Xerxes’s preparations neared completion, matters came to a head. In Laurium, south of Athens, near a temple of Poseidon frequented by Themistocles, there was discovered an enormous vein of silver. This was the fulfillment of Themistocles’ dreams: With one eye on Persia, he had long been campaigning for Athens to create a fleet. But fleets were expensive propositions, and the old hoplite class had resisted him. Athens’ future lay in good armies of farmer-warriors, as they had proven at Marathon. What good was an expensive status symbol like a fleet? Now, with this newfound bounty, the wily politician had a means of funding this fleet.
In the Assembly, however, when Themistocles proposed this, Areistides reliably rose to meet him. Traditionally, he pointed out, new finds of silver had been distributed amongst the citizens. It was a blatant appeal to the voters’ self interest, hedged about by the weight of tradition. Themistocles, refusing to indulge in scaremongering tactics by pointing to the growing Persian menace, instead whipped up the frenzy of the Athenians by pointing to a much closer enemy: Aegina.
This island, southwest of Athens, had long been at war with the democracy. Its superior fleet had enabled it to survive thus far, and Aeginan piracy had long scourged Athenian shipping. With a fleet, Athens could tip the scales and finally crush the impudent islanders once and for all.
Neither would back down. It became apparent that one or the other of the rivals had to go. Athens was paralyzed as long as both Themistocles and Areistides remained at odds. And so, in January, 482, as the citizens prepared for the ostracism, they were engaging in perhaps history’s first referendum. Considering the stakes, it was perhaps also history’s most important.
And so on the appointed day, the Athenians filed into the Assembly, and one by one, they cast their vote. Two growing piles appeared: One for the radical Themistocles, one for Areistides the Just. Now one was leading, now the other. But gradually, eventually, Areistides’ pile grew larger and larger than his rival’s. Indeed, one poor farmer, not recognizing the great man, approached the old warrior and asked him to write “Areistides” on it. Areistides, nonplussed, asked the old peasant why. “Because,” the farmer replied, “I am fed up with hearing him called the Just all the time.” Upon hearing this, Areistides took the shard, wrote his own name upon it, and then silently handed it back to the man (also note that the only possible source for this story could be old Areistides himself!).
The day ended, the vote was counted, and the result was announced: Areistides was exiled.
Themistocles would have his fleet.
There wasn't much time. Rumors were fast being whispered of movement in the East. The Persian host was on the move. And so, in two years, the Athenians embarked upon the greatest crash shipbuilding and training course in history. Purchasing agents, their purses full of Laurian silver, fanned out across the Aegean, buying as much timber as they could. The citizens of the democracy left their farms and spent days on false rowing benches on shore, learning to pull an oar, taking brief breaks for food and water, then, tired and hot, climbing back on to their cushions and pulling once more. Soon, new triremes began rolling down their slipways into the harbor of Piraeus at the awesome rate of two per week. Each was personally inspected by Themistocles himself. No inferior vessels for the Athenian navy! Each ship of the democracy had to be of the best design, the sleekest, the fastest, the toughest. And all the while, their armor gathering cobwebs in their homes, the hoplites practiced. By now, however, there was no illusion as to the enemy they were training to meet. No one imagined now that they would be rowing into battle against the Aeginans.
In 481, a year after the Athenians had begun to build their navy, Persian agents once more appeared in Greece, just as they had before Marathon ten years before. Canvassing back and forth, they demanded earth and water as tokens of submission from each city, with two ominous exceptions: No agents came to Athens or Sparta. These cities, for their sacrilege ten years before, would not be given a chance to surrender.
And so, as that terrible summer went on, when fear and dread of the impending storm hung heavy over the land, the Spartans took an unprecedented step: They called for a congress of all Greek cities to meet at the Isthmus of Corinth.
Thus it was that 481 years before the birth of Christ, the squabbling city-states of Greece at last put aside their differences and assembled in one place to meet the barbarian threat. Many, such as Athens and Aegina, were technically still at war. No one fought. All recognized that a larger threat, a threat to them all, loomed over Greece.
The decision was made to create a combined army and fleet to meet the invaders. The Spartans, naturally, would have command of the land army. But who would lead the fleet? The Athenians, with their 200 triremes contributing the bulk of the fleet, laid claim to the title, but the Aeginans and other ancient naval states balked at the parvenu. Why should not a state with a maritime tradition lead?
It was Themistocles who provided the solution. Recognizing that no naval state would accept the leadership of another, he proposed that the fleet be led by a city with not a whit of seafaring about it: Sparta. The allies agreed, realizing that giving Sparta yet more prestige was preferable to any other leading.
And so the League of Corinth was established in order to resist the Persians. Two tasks immediately confronted the allies: To boost their own numbers, and to obtain accurate intelligence on Xerxes’s army, which had arrived at Sardis in Lydia that fall.
To address the first concern, their own paltry numbers, the allies sent agents in all directions. Pro-allied factions in fence-sitting cities were boosted. Notable cities such as Thebes, which had not attended the Congress, were called to join the alliance. Envoys were sent to the Greek colonies around the Mediterranean, in southern Italy, Sicily, Spain, and Gaul.
These efforts yielded little fruit. In Sicily, the tyrant of Syracuse, Gelon, from whom the Greeks had expected much (his was the most powerful state in the Greek world, rivaling Athens or Sparta), rebuffed their entreaties. He could not move that year, he said – on the western tip of the island, from their base of Lilybaeum, the forces of a Phoenician colony on the African coast known as Carthage were massing and preparing to march to war on him. Coincidence? The mother Phoenician cities were all under the heel of the Great King, after all. Demoralized and worried, the envoys returned home empty handed.
The other task, the infiltration of the camp of Xerxes, was if anything even more demoralizing. Where once Greek cities had dominated the Aegean, that cold autumn of 481, as the three spies selected by the allies for the task sailed eastwards, they were now sailing undoubtedly into enemy waters.
Silently and carefully, they found the harbor of the Persian navy first. It was nearly enough to convince them to surrender immediately.
From far to the east had come a mighty force: The Phoenicians, the greatest traders and sailors in the world, had contributed nearly 300 triremes. These cities had dominated the waters of the Mediterranean since time immemorial. They grew up pulling an oar. Their ships were unmatched, the skill of their crews approaching perfection. And they were not alone.
From Egypt and from Ionia had come contingents to match the Phoenician squadrons. These satrapies could sail and fight nearly as well as the Phoenicians. But...perhaps, they wouldn’t. They did come from provinces with a history of rebellion, after all. If the Greek spies thought this, they were grasping at straws, however. The total force of the Persian navy was one thousand, two hundred, and seven triremes. Regardless of whether all sailed to Greece, regardless of how many were lost to the summer storms, the Greeks would be facing the most mighty force ever assembled at sea. Would Xerxes’ land army match his navy? They could only tell at Sardis, and so they hurried onward.
The sight dumbfounded them. For miles upon miles, as far as the eye could see, stretched a panorama of tents and campfires, pavilions and training grounds. Men spoke in strange tongues to each other, practiced with outlandish weapons, marshaled and assembled in huge numbers. The hordes of all Asia were assembled. The thousand nations of the Persian Empire prepared to descend upon Greece.
The spies, apparently not so subtle, were unmasked and captured by a Persian cavalry patrol. Quickly identified, they were about to be executed before a messenger from the Great King himself came hurrying up. The captives were spared, and hustled into the presence of Xerxes. After a brief interrogation, they were duly shown about the camp, allowed to take copious notes, and then sent on their way back to Greece. Xerxes was cunning. The morale blow of seeing his army in full would certainly outweigh any intelligence the Greeks gained from doing so.
The report of the agents was terrifying. Millions upon millions of barbarians were gathered, from every nation. At the core of it stood Xerxes and his elite corps of bodyguards: One thousand spearmen, who stood on perpetual guard before his chambers back in Susa, were joined by nine thousand of their comrades to form a body of ten thousand troops: The Immortals. There were elite cavalry squadrons from Persia, Media, Bactria, India, the wide steppes of Asia, the high mountains of the Zagros. And finally, from all subject nations, a teeming mass of spear-fodder. In all, reported later historians in awed breaths, the army was numbered at one million, seven hundred thousand men. 1,700,000,000. The entire world stood united behind Xerxes and the force of Truth, to bring the Greeks out from under the darkness of the Lie.
In the spring, this force moved out.
They moved slowly, ponderously to the north. There, the army stopped at a site ominous to the Greeks. It was a few grassy mounds, alone in a plain in northern Anatolia, not much to look at. However, this site was one of the most significant in history to the Greeks, the source of their oldest stories, the site of their bloodiest war, the birthplace of their mightiest heroes: Troy. Xerxes poured libations upon the ruined stones of the city, his message clear: Asia was coming to avenge the ancient sack of the city. Sparta and Athens would burn in the name of Priam.
The army moved on, and soon came to the Hellespont. There stood the pontoon bridge, the gateway to Europe, and conquest. Before they could cross, however, a massive storm came up and swept the bridge away. Xerxes, furious, had ordered a new one built. He had then lashed the sea several times with a whip, and tossed a pair of fetters into its depths. No more trouble arose, and the new bridge held.
Before he crossed, Xerxes was approached by an old friend, Pythias of Lydia. Pythias, an old, fabulously wealthy man, had fed and bankrolled the army while it stayed at Sardis through the winter. Now, as most of his sons prepared to march to war, he came and asked the Great King that his eldest might be spared to help him on the farm.
Xerxes was scandalized. He, and all his relatives, was prepared to march to battle. How dare this peasant, this slave of the King of Kings, presume special treatment? Such insolence could not go unpunished. Fulfilling the man’s request, Xerxes had ordered Pythias’s eldest son chopped in half, his two halves flung to either side of the road. The army marched between them on its way to Europe.
At last, the crossing could commence. Led by the Immortals, the army began to slowly filter across the great bridge. All day and all night it continued. Dawn came. The crossing continued. Seven days in all it took for the mighty army to cross.
Into Thrace the march continued. The ground shook beneath the boots of so many men at the army’s approach. When they drank, entire rivers ran dry. Entire countrysides were stripped barren, devoid of all life, all to feed the army of the King of Kings. And as spring rolled into summer, they moved through
the territory of their ally, the Kingdom of Macedonia, and descended into Greece.
~
In the south, the Greeks had continued their frantic preparations for the defense. One last attempt had been made to recruit allies – the recalcitrant Argives, still bitter with Sparta, had demanded a thirty year truce and a share in the command as their condition for aid. Impossible demands. Gelon, for his part, demanded command over the entire Greek force. When the ambassadors had recoiled in disgust as this idea, the tyrant had contemptuously sneered, “It seems you have no lack of leaders, my friends – all you need now is to find some men for them to lead!”
Without Gelon’s 200 triremes, many doubted that the Greek fleet of some 300 ships could meet the Persian fleet on anything like equal terms. And without the fleet, any defense of the mountain passes by the hoplites would be meaningless – the Persians could simply outflank the defenders with their fleet, and overwhelm them with numbers.
The Spartans could urge no action. The city was in consternation from the prophecy the Oracle had given them:
Your fate, o inhabitants of the broad fields of Sparta,
Is to see your great and famous city destroyed by the sons of Perseus.
Either that, or everyone within the borders of Lacedaemon,,
Must mourn the death of a king, sprung from the line of Heracles.
To make matters worse, with no help from the Argives, and with their helots agitating for barbarian rule as preferable to the iron fist of the Spartans, they were compelled to keep most of their army at home to prevent a revolt. They would be able to send scarcely any troops north of the Peloponnese.
The Athenians, for their part, had their doubts about their new role in things. With the approach of the barbarian, many dealt with their nerves by newfound nostalgia for Marathon. Many a farmer, during the long hours of practice, itched to bash his oar over smug Themistocle’s head and meet the Persians with spear in hand, as Greeks were meant to do. The politician, facing challenges at home, was in no position to urge the League to action.
The democracy, when it had consulted the oracle, had received even more disastrous words than the Spartans. The Pythia had fallen into a frenzy, screaming for the Athenians to flee, warning of black blood that would drown Attica. Images of fire, carnage, and annihilation. The god of war was coming. Towers crumbled in his wake. The temples of Athens would burn.
The Athenian embassies were stunned. So that was it, then. Their city was doomed. Who could doubt the will of Zeus? As they turned to leave, however, the Oracle spoke once more.
And yet – this word I give you, adamant, a promise:
Everything within the borders of Attica shall fall,
Yes, and the sacred vales of nearby mountain ranges,
But the wooden wall alone, the wooden wall shall stand,
That much Zeus grants to Athena, as an aid to you and all your children.
Men on horses, men on foot, sweeping they come from Asia:
Retreat, for soon enough you will meet with them face to face.
Divine Salamis – you will be the ruin of many a mother’s son,
When the seed is scattered, or the harvest is gathered in.
The oracle’s words, the only slender thread of hope the Athenians had, were disseminated and debated. Themistocles had argued that the wooden wall could only refer to ships – why else refer to Salamis, the island the democracy had conquered long ago, which had touched off the long struggle with Pisistratus and his sons, and the eventual foundation of the democracy? His opponents pointed out the oracle had not referred to which mothers – barbarian or Greek – would mourn their sons. Had not Croesus fallen for just such an error? No, the wooden wall had to refer to the old fence around the Acropolis.
And so once again, the Assembly gathered for a debate, to settle once and for all the means by which Athens would fight the war. The implications of Themistocles’ naval policy were clear: Even if every able bodied man was to pull an oar, the fleet would still be dangerously short of men. No force could be spared to garrison the Acropolis. Athens would be left naked.
That meant that the Athenians could not stay there. Women, children, old – everyone, would have to be evacuated, should the defenses at the passes fail. The voters looked around at their city. They could see its entire history laid out around them – the old temple where the first Alcmaeonid had defeated the first attempt at tyranny. The old temple of Athena raised by the Boutads, those old aristocrats. Half-completed, a new, shining temple to Athena, begun by the voters after Marathon, a labor of love. In the background, the mountain, below which ran the roads to Marathon. How could they abandon all this?
Abandonment was exactly what Themistocles was proposing, however. The Athenians could not again fight the invaders on the beaches. It was possible that they could still be stopped north of Attica. But it was doubtful of the insular Spartans could be persuaded to fight north of the Pelopponese at all. They would only do so if they saw the dedication of the Athenians to protecting their flank: That meant the navy. Thus, to save Attica, they had to be willing to abandon her.
The Athenians, facing the greatest crisis in their history, decided to trust Themistocles. They would fight at sea. They would trust in the wooden walls of the ships.
With Athens at last united, the Greeks sallied forth to meet the invaders. Their first expedition, however, was a fiasco. Informed by the Thessalians of the Great King’s approach, they had searched for a suitable mountain pass to defend, to negate his advantage in numbers. The Thessalians had proposed the vale of Tempe, north of Mt. Olympus. Ten thousand hoplites, under the command of a Spartan nobleman and Themistocles, had duly been dispatched north. Barely had they begun to dig in, however, when scouts had reported that not only were there multiple passes flanking them, but also half of Thessaly had already capitulated to the Persian host, and Persian agents swarmed about them. The allies had been forced into a humiliating withdrawal.
And so the Persians marched on. Day by agonizing day, they grew closer. June turned into July, and July into August. This caused a crisis in Sparta. August was the time of their holy festival – the same that had prevented them from aiding the Athenians at Marathon ten years before. To make matters worse, it was also the occasion of their Olympic Games. No Spartan army could march in August.
The Athenians could not wait. The docks were already in chaos with the evacuation, but now the fleet had to be launched. Scrambling, desperate, the fleet – the lack of manpower made up by volunteers from Plataea – embarked towards Euboea. At the northern end of the island, the straits narrowed to a channel less than six miles across. It was the one place the fleet could hope to meet the Persian triremes on anything like equal terms. The straits were named for the temple of Artemis that stood nearby: Artemisium. But without Sparta, to hold the land passes, what good was a naval defense?
A compromise had to be found. The Spartan army could not fight, but the allies could. Darius had yet to pass through a narrow neck of land near some hot springs, appropriately called the Hot Gates: Thermopylae. If each allied city between Sparta and Thermopylae contributed troops to hold the pass, and if they were stiffened by a crack squad of Spartan hoplites, the best in the city…and if they were led by a king…Thermopylae might be held.
And so it came to pass in the summer of 480 that the king Leonidas marched north to Thermopylae with 300 bodyguards, all with living sons. The message to the allies could not be clearer: The Spartans intended to hold or die. There would be no retreat from Thermopylae.
Thursday, July 31, 2014
Saturday, July 19, 2014
The First Marathon
“Master, remember the Athenians!”
After his victory at Lade, Darius began to take steps to punish the insolent Athenians who had burnt Sardis once and for all. Two options were open to him. The only land route was to the north, across the narrow straits of the Hellespont, and then across barbarian lands in Thrace and down through Macedonia. It was long, difficult, and dangerous. The alternative was an island-hopping path directly across the Aegean. It was shorter, but no way to transport a large army. Darius decided on a land invasion first.
In Athens, the populace was in a state of panic. The sack of Miletus was shown in a popular play that summer. The men were slaughtered, the women raped, the boys castrated, the girls sold into slavery and carried deep into Persia. Adding to the chaos and confusion, Miltiades, the tyrant of the Hellespont, who had advocated betraying Darius more than 15 years before when he campaigned over the Danube, narrowly escaped the conquest of his home. Slipping by the skin of his teeth past a Persian naval squadron sent to intercept him, he was pursued across the Aegean, slipping into the Athenian harbor of the Piraeus just ahead of his pursuers. He brought news that the next year Darius would send army through Thrace, to descend upon Greece from the north. To make matters worse, the Argives, eager to recover the position they had lost half a century before, allied with Persia. They hoped to see mighty Sparta crushed and burned, like Miletus.
Cleomenes, still attempting to save face since his humiliation at Athens the decade before, did not take too kindly to this measure. He led an army north, to Argos. His seers informed him that an Argive river god would doom his army if he dared cross his waters. The Spartan king snorted, “How very patriotic of him,” and led his army by another route. He then pinned the Argive army in a grove sacred to Apollo, and then lured them out, one by one, with the promise of ransom and safety, only to betray each in turn and execute them. When the survivors caught on, and refused to come out, Cleomenes callously ordered the grove to be burnt, his hoplite calmly dispatching each survivor that ran out. Faced with this horrific act of sacrilege, Argos meekly surrendered. Culled of an entire generation, the city was left so enfeebled that even tiny Mycenae, the old kingdom of Agamemnon, the famous leader of the expedition to Troy, was able to reassert its independence after centuries. Thus ever to cities that supported the barbarian.
During this time, the first Persian expedition to punish Athens had departed, under a man by the name of Mardonius. They marched quickly through Thrace, and descended upon Macedonia, which quickly surrendered and became a Persian client state. However, a few weeks later, the Persian camp was ravaged by a horde of Thracian barbarians and Mardonius himself was wounded. When nearly the entire fleet was destroyed in a storm off of Mount Athos a few days later, the Persians abandoned the expedition for the year and withdrew.
“Master, remember the Athenians!”
The next year, however, the Persians began laying the groundwork for their next expedition. All through the year of 492 BC, Persian messengers travelled up and down Greece, demanding earth and water from each city as a token of their submission. Only two cities denied this request: In Athens, the messengers were dragged before the Assembly of the people, tried, and executed on bogus charges. In Sparta, Cleomenes threw the messengers down a well, telling them before they drowned, “You’ll find plenty of both there.” It is not reported whether or not he kicked them while doing so.
Darius now knew who his opponents were. He needed only an opening. The sea route could only support a limited number of troops – he could not fight both Athens and Sparta at once. But one, then the other…yes, that was feasible.
His chance came in 491. Sparta’s king, Cleomenes, in a power struggle with her other king, Demaratus (the Laws of Lycurgus had instituted a dual monarchy, so that one king could serve as a check on the other), and was able to bribe the Oracle at Delphi into declaring Demaratus illegitimate. However, while his successor was still getting used to the reins of power, Cleomenes’ bribe was discovered, and in the ensuing scandal the king was driven out of Sparta. He threatened to raise an army amongst Sparta’s subject states, and reinstate himself forcibly, and the terrified Spartan assembly invited him back in – where he was quickly tried for insanity and imprisoned in the stocks. When his badly mangled body was discovered the next morning, the cause of death was ruled to be suicide.
Darius did not miss this moment. As the new Spartan king, Leonidas, replaced Cleomenes, the Persian host gathered. Over the great roads of the Persian Empire – the finest in the world, used only by officials of the Great King – came soldiers from every nation. Medes, Bactrians, Sogdianans, Persians, Lydians, Arabs, Egyptians, and countless others marched into Sardis, where they found the fleet waiting for them. To most of these men, Athens was nothing more than a name. But Datis, the commander of the expedition, knew the truth. The Athenians were a terrorist state, responsible for an unprovoked attack on Persia. They were clearly enthralled by the Lie (what sort of Oracle spoke only in riddles?). Their only hope for salvation was for them to be purged with the holy flame.
And so, after months of preparation, in the summer of 490 the great fleet of the Persian sailed. At first, observed by the Ionians on the coast, it seemed to be sailing northwards. Another expedition to Thrace, then? Suddenly, the fleet swung to the west. The Ionian Greeks gasped in horror. The only place the fleet could be sailing to the west was to rebellious Athens, and the mainland.
All through that long, terrible summer, news trickled into Athens, daily increasing the terror and panic over the approach of the army of Datis. Naxos, the city which ten years before had successfully resisted the Persian attack and so had precipitated the entire business, was stormed and put to the torch. The island of Delium, the holy birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, was captured by Datis, who showed leniency to the inhabitants and sacrificed at the temple of Apollo. The smoke of the sacrifice, and the smoke of Naxos, cast a long shadow westward over the sea as the armada drew ever closer. One by one, the free islands in the Aegean fell. If a particularly educated Athenian had possessed a map, he could have traced the progress of the fleet as it drew inexorably closer.
At last, late in August, after months at sea, the army of the barbarian arrived. Datis had decided to strike at Eretria on the island of Euboea first, securing his rear before he moved on the primary target of Athens itself. The army landed unopposed. Datis must have breathed a sigh of relief – his army was its most vulnerable disembarking. The Eretrians would try to make a fight of it from the walls. The Persians duly obliged.
For five days, the fighting was terrible, as the Persian horde came on at the walls of Eretria and the inhabitants bravely repulsed them. On the sixth day, the most terrible and insidious Persian weapon of all proved victorious. A pair of citizens, paid off by Persian gold from the limitless coffers of Darius, opened the gates and allowed the barbarian to flood in. The city was burnt to the ground, the males executed, and the women and children carted off into slavery, dragged in chains onto the Persian vessels. Watching the spectacle was a familiar face: Hippias the Pisistratid.
The old tyrant, now over eighty years of age, had not seen his homeland in two decades. He had fled to the court of the Great King in Persepolis, and now served as an advisor to Datis in his punitive expedition. Hippias thought to win his throne back, and so now he was a traitor, guiding the Persians straight to his old home.
He would have advised Datis of an excellent landing ground, 26 miles north of Athens: A beautiful crescent shaped harbor, with a wide plain to encamp the army, and two roads running south around the mountains straight to Athens. The harbor of Marathon. It was there, nearly half a century before, where he had landed with his brother and his father in Pisistratus’s third and final attack on the city. Now Datis would use Marathon to mount his own attack on the city.
Athens was thrown into a state of uproar at the approach of the King’s punishment. Two options stood before the citizenry: Did they make their stand at the walls, as the Eretrians had, or did they march out and meet the invaders in the field? They were not pretty options. Could Athens, as riven with factionalism and infighting as it was, hope to hold out against a siege when it had taken but two Eretrian citizens to betray that city to the hands of the barbarian? But, to meet the Persians in the field…In the half-century the two sides had been in contact, not once had a Greek force beaten a Persian in open combat. Not once. Indeed, since the time of Cyrus, Persian arms had never been defeated by any power, great or small. Any army the democracy fielded would be horrendously outnumbered.
It was Miltiades, the famous Mede-fighter, who carried the day. Athens could hold the invader at the beachhead, he argued – if they had the assistance of the Spartans. It was decided. The army of democracy would hold the roads leading from Marathon to Athens long enough for the Spartan army to take the field against the foe. And so, while 10,000 hoplites rushed to Marathon, one lone runner, Philipides, rushed the other direction, towards Sparta.
In two days, Philipides raced 170 miles into the Peloponnesus. Late in the evening the second day, he would have begun descending into the valley of Laconia, and there, sprawled before him, would stand the group of villages known as Sparta. The sight would have been much different from grim Athens. Sparta was in the height of her annual religious festival. It was quite impossible, the elders informed Philipides, for the Spartan army to march for at least a week. Adding in the three day march from Sparta to Marathon, and the Athenian army had to hold out ten days without Spartan aid. Old Cleomenes would have snorted in contempt at the religious restrictions, and moved out anyways. But not these new kings. They were not yet established, and besides, after all the sacrilege of Cleomenes, look what he had come to! No, no aid for Athens yet. The democracy would have to hold.
And so back to the north ran Philipides. He arrived in Athens soon enough. The city was intact. The citizens were fearful, since they had had no news from the front, but morale was holding. No one would betray the city to the Mede yet, at least. But, were the Persian fleet to appear while the army was away…The city might yet be lost. Philipides ran on, to Marathon, and the waiting armies.
He arrived to find the situation a stalemate. So quickly had the Athenians moved that they had managed to secure both exits to the plain of Marathon, and had quickly dug in. The hoplites’ flanks were well protected, and the tiny city of Plataea had sent 800 hoplites to reinforce their allies. This gesture, though of little material aid when the Greeks were outnumbered at the very least 3 to 1, was a tremendous morale booster to the Athenians.
The Persians were encamped on the other end of the plain, near the beach. Datis could not risk a frontal attack on the dug-in hoplites, the only way to break out of the plain. However, neither could he delay. Every day he waited, the Spartan army would grow closer and the Greeks would be able to attack.
When Philipides at last arrived at the battlefield, he was able to inform the Athenian generals that they had but a week to wait. A week. They could hold for a week. Probably. They couldn’t risk an attack on the Persians – not with their numbers, and especially not with the Persian cavalry, which would quickly outflank and decimate the phalanx. And so the two sides sat, and stared at each other for five days. The Persian cavalry would ride right up to the Athenian lines, taunting them, daring them to battle, but would not venture further, nor would the hoplites venture to attack. And daily the Spartans’ arrival drew closer. The Athenians were terrified. What if Datis simply left part of his army there to pin the Athenians, and with his fleet he slipped around via the sea, to take the city in the rear? The army of democracy might hold here but return to find their city in ruins.
At last, on the fifth night, a pair of Ionian deserters broke out from the Persian camp. They carried frightening news with them: The cavalry has embarked! Datis was making his move.
A hurried council of war was convened. Should the army withdraw to Athens, and meet the Persians at the walls? Then they would be in the same situation as before. Should they attack? Miltiades, one of ten generals with the army, argued so. Even though the Persians had never been beaten, even though the Greeks were outnumbered many times, they could not miss this chance. This was their one chance to strike the Persians with no cavalry! Now, if ever, an attack would succeed. He swayed 4 of his 9 fellow generals. 5 disagreed. The deciding vote now lay with Callimachus, an old, tough soldier who served as commander-in-chief. He decided to trust the only man who had experience with the Persians. He voted to attack.
Quietly, in the pre-dawn darkness, the army of democracy deployed. On the left stood the Plataeans. In the center were Themistocles and Areistides, two rising stars in the democracy, serving with Callimachus. On the right, the place of honor, Miltiades was in command. Miltiades, fearful of being outflanked and overwhelmed by the superior numbers of the barbarian, had broken standard practice and thinned out his center to half the normal depth of fighting men, focusing on the wings, so that the length of the small Greek army would match the length of the Persian one come morning.
The sun dawned that bright autumn day, and the Persian army, looking across the plain, would have at last seen the Greek phalanx descending from the mountains and moving out to fight. Stunned, disbelieving, and gleeful that the cowardly servants of the Lie would at last fight them, the Persians would have begun reaching for their bows and slings, exchanging excited, hungry, looks.
And the Athenian army began to charge.
_
Fully outfitted, a hoplite weighs about seventy pounds. He is almost completely encased in bronze. Bronze greaves protect the thighs, a bronze breastplate for the torso, and a helmet that nearly totally engulfs the head, topped with a fearsome plume, a Greek warrior armed for battle looks almost more machine than man. In his right arm he carries an eight-foot heavy ashwood spear, on his left hangs the mighty hoplon, or shield, from whence the hoplite drew his name. He was the most heavily armed and armored fighter in the ancient world.
In battle, the hoplites would form a phalanx. It was simple enough. Arrayed eight deep, the hoplites would present their shields to the enemy, and through the gaps protruded their spears. This formation, perhaps the most famous in history, was more than simple shield wall. The shield of each hoplite did not protect its wielder, but rather the man to his left. Thus, the men in the phalanx were dependent on each other, not on themselves, for protection. It bound the entire force tightly together, and so discipline and firmness were emphasized, not courage and great acts of killing.
Panic was the greatest enemy of a hoplite army. If one’s comrade broke the phalanx, one would be exposed to the enemy. Entire phalanxes could dissolve and the men in them slaughtered. To combat this, and to help the men maintain formation on the charge, different cities instituted various war cries or music. The Spartans, for example, advanced in perfect silence but for the playing of a flute to keep them in time, terrifying their more boisterous enemies. The Thebans let loose a wild, whooping yell. And the Athenians possessed a terrifying, ululating cry that rose up as they crashed into a foe: “Elelelelele!”
Now that cry, bursting from ten thousand throats, echoed over the field of Marathon.
The phalanx crashed right through the storm of arrows and bolts the Persians threw at them, their heavy bronze easily defeating the attacks. The Persians were shocked – no one had ever made it through that intact before! They frantically began to scramble to erect their defenses, but it was too late. The Athenians plowed into the Persian army before it was ready.
The army of Persia was an amalgamation of all the various nations within the empire. Each fought with its own style – archery, perhaps, like the Medes, or the great axes and metal caps of the Saka, or the long spears of the Persians themselves. They had one thing in common, though: They wore almost no armor. In the East, where cavalry was king, what good was it? Armored men were slow, easily outmaneuvered by quick horsemen. Armor was a liability. Easterners fought with shields of wicker, and leather jerkin or cotton armor. Enough to stop an arrow, or perhaps a slingstone.
Not enough to stop a phalanx head on.
The Athenian army crashed into the first ranks of the Persian force, and immediately plunged several ranks deeper. Their heavy spears, instead of shivering as in a collision of phalanxes, where both sides struggled against the other’s heavy bronze armor, plunged through wicker and leather easily, chewing through flesh in an instant. The barbarians were ground up, unable to make a scratch in the armored wall of bronze now bearing down upon them. Many weren’t even struck with weapons, but were simply crushed by the enormous weight of the Greeks striding ever forward.
Pressed backwards, unable to gain ground to regroup, the Persians on the flanks began to break off and flee backwards towards the ships. In the center, however, where the phalanx was only four rather than eight ranks thick, where the more disciplined Persian spearmen stood, where the wild Saka possessed axes capable of cleaving through a hoplite breastplate, the advance stalled, and the Greeks began to lose ground. However, the men on the flanks, watching their foes flee before them, wheeled inwards, and took the remaining invaders in the flank. The Persians fought on for a while, then also broke, and ran for the ships.
Realizing the battle was not yet won, the Greek generals led their men in pursuit. If the Persian army was able to embark, they could sail to Athens before the army could return, and all would be for naught. The fighting here was more intense than at any other time in the battle. The Greeks fought in amongst the beached ships, stabbing upwards with their spears, defending against missiles hurled from above, all semblance of order gone. The Persians fought desperately to escape, fending men off their ships, thrusting down, attempting to push off. Callimachus, the old general, was killed here. The brother of a man who in later years would become famous as the playwright Aeschylus, Cynaigeirus, was killed when he laid his hand upon a trireme to stop it escaping, and had it struck off with an ax. In the end, seven ships of the Persian fleet of more than six hundred were taken.
No time to rest. It was not yet ten in the morning, but the Persian cavalry had departed several hours before. Athens was not yet safe. The army turned and began to race back over the mountain to get to their city ahead of the Persians. But would they make it in time? What if the city was betrayed, as Eretria was, before the hoplites returned?
The story goes that the Athenians sent famous Philipides on one last run, to stop anyone from selling their city to the barbarians. Philipides raced back over the 26 miles to Athens, after his earlier epic run to Sparta, after his run to the battlefield, after having fought in the battle. Exhausted, stumbling, he reached the city and was met by several elders of the assembly. Collapsing before them, breathless, he gasped out a single word:
“Victory!”
And he died.
The rest of the army, marching hard, was able to arrive several hours later. Bare minutes after their arrival, the first Persian ships glided into the harbor at Phalerum, only to be greeted by an assembly of the entire army of hoplites that had so recently slaughtered their comrades at Marathon. Artaphernes, in command now that Datis had been slain on the field, realized he could not take the city. The Persian fleet sat and stared in disbelief. Hippias the tyrant looked one last time upon his homeland. Then the fleet turned and rowed back out to sea, thence homewards.
In the aftermath of the battle, the Spartans came hurrying up from the Peloponnese, only to be crushingly disappointed that they had missed the entire affair. They marched out to the battlefield to inspect the Persian dead, however. What they saw would have encouraged them. Such weakly armed barbarians would never stand up to Spartan steel!
Marathon was a sea-change for Greece. The battle had cost the Athenians 192 dead, out of their force of 10,000. They were given an honor unprecedented in Athenian history: Rather than being brought back to the city for burial, the 192 were given a magnificent memorial on the field itself. The 6400-odd Persian did were ignobly shoved into a pit and buried en masse. Could men who had lived as slaves all their lives really expect any better? The survivors were heroes in Athens, and would dominate Athenian politics for decades to come. Before, the Mede had always been talked of in tones of hushed fear or awe. Now, after the great victory, men spoke the word “barbarian” with a sneer of contempt. Good Greek men would always be able to beat such effeminate trouser-wearers. Now, for the first time Greeks began to conceive as themselves as inhabiting a continent separate from Asia, one that it seemed natural Greece should rule. From hence, they would define themselves even more than in the past as a people apart, a people special. The consequences of this development would forever shape the succeeding millennia. This was the dawn of Western culture. This was the dawn of the Greek Golden Age. Marathon was the birth cry of Europe.
After his victory at Lade, Darius began to take steps to punish the insolent Athenians who had burnt Sardis once and for all. Two options were open to him. The only land route was to the north, across the narrow straits of the Hellespont, and then across barbarian lands in Thrace and down through Macedonia. It was long, difficult, and dangerous. The alternative was an island-hopping path directly across the Aegean. It was shorter, but no way to transport a large army. Darius decided on a land invasion first.
In Athens, the populace was in a state of panic. The sack of Miletus was shown in a popular play that summer. The men were slaughtered, the women raped, the boys castrated, the girls sold into slavery and carried deep into Persia. Adding to the chaos and confusion, Miltiades, the tyrant of the Hellespont, who had advocated betraying Darius more than 15 years before when he campaigned over the Danube, narrowly escaped the conquest of his home. Slipping by the skin of his teeth past a Persian naval squadron sent to intercept him, he was pursued across the Aegean, slipping into the Athenian harbor of the Piraeus just ahead of his pursuers. He brought news that the next year Darius would send army through Thrace, to descend upon Greece from the north. To make matters worse, the Argives, eager to recover the position they had lost half a century before, allied with Persia. They hoped to see mighty Sparta crushed and burned, like Miletus.
Cleomenes, still attempting to save face since his humiliation at Athens the decade before, did not take too kindly to this measure. He led an army north, to Argos. His seers informed him that an Argive river god would doom his army if he dared cross his waters. The Spartan king snorted, “How very patriotic of him,” and led his army by another route. He then pinned the Argive army in a grove sacred to Apollo, and then lured them out, one by one, with the promise of ransom and safety, only to betray each in turn and execute them. When the survivors caught on, and refused to come out, Cleomenes callously ordered the grove to be burnt, his hoplite calmly dispatching each survivor that ran out. Faced with this horrific act of sacrilege, Argos meekly surrendered. Culled of an entire generation, the city was left so enfeebled that even tiny Mycenae, the old kingdom of Agamemnon, the famous leader of the expedition to Troy, was able to reassert its independence after centuries. Thus ever to cities that supported the barbarian.
During this time, the first Persian expedition to punish Athens had departed, under a man by the name of Mardonius. They marched quickly through Thrace, and descended upon Macedonia, which quickly surrendered and became a Persian client state. However, a few weeks later, the Persian camp was ravaged by a horde of Thracian barbarians and Mardonius himself was wounded. When nearly the entire fleet was destroyed in a storm off of Mount Athos a few days later, the Persians abandoned the expedition for the year and withdrew.
“Master, remember the Athenians!”
The next year, however, the Persians began laying the groundwork for their next expedition. All through the year of 492 BC, Persian messengers travelled up and down Greece, demanding earth and water from each city as a token of their submission. Only two cities denied this request: In Athens, the messengers were dragged before the Assembly of the people, tried, and executed on bogus charges. In Sparta, Cleomenes threw the messengers down a well, telling them before they drowned, “You’ll find plenty of both there.” It is not reported whether or not he kicked them while doing so.
Darius now knew who his opponents were. He needed only an opening. The sea route could only support a limited number of troops – he could not fight both Athens and Sparta at once. But one, then the other…yes, that was feasible.
His chance came in 491. Sparta’s king, Cleomenes, in a power struggle with her other king, Demaratus (the Laws of Lycurgus had instituted a dual monarchy, so that one king could serve as a check on the other), and was able to bribe the Oracle at Delphi into declaring Demaratus illegitimate. However, while his successor was still getting used to the reins of power, Cleomenes’ bribe was discovered, and in the ensuing scandal the king was driven out of Sparta. He threatened to raise an army amongst Sparta’s subject states, and reinstate himself forcibly, and the terrified Spartan assembly invited him back in – where he was quickly tried for insanity and imprisoned in the stocks. When his badly mangled body was discovered the next morning, the cause of death was ruled to be suicide.
Darius did not miss this moment. As the new Spartan king, Leonidas, replaced Cleomenes, the Persian host gathered. Over the great roads of the Persian Empire – the finest in the world, used only by officials of the Great King – came soldiers from every nation. Medes, Bactrians, Sogdianans, Persians, Lydians, Arabs, Egyptians, and countless others marched into Sardis, where they found the fleet waiting for them. To most of these men, Athens was nothing more than a name. But Datis, the commander of the expedition, knew the truth. The Athenians were a terrorist state, responsible for an unprovoked attack on Persia. They were clearly enthralled by the Lie (what sort of Oracle spoke only in riddles?). Their only hope for salvation was for them to be purged with the holy flame.
And so, after months of preparation, in the summer of 490 the great fleet of the Persian sailed. At first, observed by the Ionians on the coast, it seemed to be sailing northwards. Another expedition to Thrace, then? Suddenly, the fleet swung to the west. The Ionian Greeks gasped in horror. The only place the fleet could be sailing to the west was to rebellious Athens, and the mainland.
All through that long, terrible summer, news trickled into Athens, daily increasing the terror and panic over the approach of the army of Datis. Naxos, the city which ten years before had successfully resisted the Persian attack and so had precipitated the entire business, was stormed and put to the torch. The island of Delium, the holy birthplace of Apollo and Artemis, was captured by Datis, who showed leniency to the inhabitants and sacrificed at the temple of Apollo. The smoke of the sacrifice, and the smoke of Naxos, cast a long shadow westward over the sea as the armada drew ever closer. One by one, the free islands in the Aegean fell. If a particularly educated Athenian had possessed a map, he could have traced the progress of the fleet as it drew inexorably closer.
At last, late in August, after months at sea, the army of the barbarian arrived. Datis had decided to strike at Eretria on the island of Euboea first, securing his rear before he moved on the primary target of Athens itself. The army landed unopposed. Datis must have breathed a sigh of relief – his army was its most vulnerable disembarking. The Eretrians would try to make a fight of it from the walls. The Persians duly obliged.
For five days, the fighting was terrible, as the Persian horde came on at the walls of Eretria and the inhabitants bravely repulsed them. On the sixth day, the most terrible and insidious Persian weapon of all proved victorious. A pair of citizens, paid off by Persian gold from the limitless coffers of Darius, opened the gates and allowed the barbarian to flood in. The city was burnt to the ground, the males executed, and the women and children carted off into slavery, dragged in chains onto the Persian vessels. Watching the spectacle was a familiar face: Hippias the Pisistratid.
The old tyrant, now over eighty years of age, had not seen his homeland in two decades. He had fled to the court of the Great King in Persepolis, and now served as an advisor to Datis in his punitive expedition. Hippias thought to win his throne back, and so now he was a traitor, guiding the Persians straight to his old home.
He would have advised Datis of an excellent landing ground, 26 miles north of Athens: A beautiful crescent shaped harbor, with a wide plain to encamp the army, and two roads running south around the mountains straight to Athens. The harbor of Marathon. It was there, nearly half a century before, where he had landed with his brother and his father in Pisistratus’s third and final attack on the city. Now Datis would use Marathon to mount his own attack on the city.
Athens was thrown into a state of uproar at the approach of the King’s punishment. Two options stood before the citizenry: Did they make their stand at the walls, as the Eretrians had, or did they march out and meet the invaders in the field? They were not pretty options. Could Athens, as riven with factionalism and infighting as it was, hope to hold out against a siege when it had taken but two Eretrian citizens to betray that city to the hands of the barbarian? But, to meet the Persians in the field…In the half-century the two sides had been in contact, not once had a Greek force beaten a Persian in open combat. Not once. Indeed, since the time of Cyrus, Persian arms had never been defeated by any power, great or small. Any army the democracy fielded would be horrendously outnumbered.
It was Miltiades, the famous Mede-fighter, who carried the day. Athens could hold the invader at the beachhead, he argued – if they had the assistance of the Spartans. It was decided. The army of democracy would hold the roads leading from Marathon to Athens long enough for the Spartan army to take the field against the foe. And so, while 10,000 hoplites rushed to Marathon, one lone runner, Philipides, rushed the other direction, towards Sparta.
In two days, Philipides raced 170 miles into the Peloponnesus. Late in the evening the second day, he would have begun descending into the valley of Laconia, and there, sprawled before him, would stand the group of villages known as Sparta. The sight would have been much different from grim Athens. Sparta was in the height of her annual religious festival. It was quite impossible, the elders informed Philipides, for the Spartan army to march for at least a week. Adding in the three day march from Sparta to Marathon, and the Athenian army had to hold out ten days without Spartan aid. Old Cleomenes would have snorted in contempt at the religious restrictions, and moved out anyways. But not these new kings. They were not yet established, and besides, after all the sacrilege of Cleomenes, look what he had come to! No, no aid for Athens yet. The democracy would have to hold.
And so back to the north ran Philipides. He arrived in Athens soon enough. The city was intact. The citizens were fearful, since they had had no news from the front, but morale was holding. No one would betray the city to the Mede yet, at least. But, were the Persian fleet to appear while the army was away…The city might yet be lost. Philipides ran on, to Marathon, and the waiting armies.
He arrived to find the situation a stalemate. So quickly had the Athenians moved that they had managed to secure both exits to the plain of Marathon, and had quickly dug in. The hoplites’ flanks were well protected, and the tiny city of Plataea had sent 800 hoplites to reinforce their allies. This gesture, though of little material aid when the Greeks were outnumbered at the very least 3 to 1, was a tremendous morale booster to the Athenians.
The Persians were encamped on the other end of the plain, near the beach. Datis could not risk a frontal attack on the dug-in hoplites, the only way to break out of the plain. However, neither could he delay. Every day he waited, the Spartan army would grow closer and the Greeks would be able to attack.
When Philipides at last arrived at the battlefield, he was able to inform the Athenian generals that they had but a week to wait. A week. They could hold for a week. Probably. They couldn’t risk an attack on the Persians – not with their numbers, and especially not with the Persian cavalry, which would quickly outflank and decimate the phalanx. And so the two sides sat, and stared at each other for five days. The Persian cavalry would ride right up to the Athenian lines, taunting them, daring them to battle, but would not venture further, nor would the hoplites venture to attack. And daily the Spartans’ arrival drew closer. The Athenians were terrified. What if Datis simply left part of his army there to pin the Athenians, and with his fleet he slipped around via the sea, to take the city in the rear? The army of democracy might hold here but return to find their city in ruins.
At last, on the fifth night, a pair of Ionian deserters broke out from the Persian camp. They carried frightening news with them: The cavalry has embarked! Datis was making his move.
A hurried council of war was convened. Should the army withdraw to Athens, and meet the Persians at the walls? Then they would be in the same situation as before. Should they attack? Miltiades, one of ten generals with the army, argued so. Even though the Persians had never been beaten, even though the Greeks were outnumbered many times, they could not miss this chance. This was their one chance to strike the Persians with no cavalry! Now, if ever, an attack would succeed. He swayed 4 of his 9 fellow generals. 5 disagreed. The deciding vote now lay with Callimachus, an old, tough soldier who served as commander-in-chief. He decided to trust the only man who had experience with the Persians. He voted to attack.
Quietly, in the pre-dawn darkness, the army of democracy deployed. On the left stood the Plataeans. In the center were Themistocles and Areistides, two rising stars in the democracy, serving with Callimachus. On the right, the place of honor, Miltiades was in command. Miltiades, fearful of being outflanked and overwhelmed by the superior numbers of the barbarian, had broken standard practice and thinned out his center to half the normal depth of fighting men, focusing on the wings, so that the length of the small Greek army would match the length of the Persian one come morning.
The sun dawned that bright autumn day, and the Persian army, looking across the plain, would have at last seen the Greek phalanx descending from the mountains and moving out to fight. Stunned, disbelieving, and gleeful that the cowardly servants of the Lie would at last fight them, the Persians would have begun reaching for their bows and slings, exchanging excited, hungry, looks.
And the Athenian army began to charge.
_
Fully outfitted, a hoplite weighs about seventy pounds. He is almost completely encased in bronze. Bronze greaves protect the thighs, a bronze breastplate for the torso, and a helmet that nearly totally engulfs the head, topped with a fearsome plume, a Greek warrior armed for battle looks almost more machine than man. In his right arm he carries an eight-foot heavy ashwood spear, on his left hangs the mighty hoplon, or shield, from whence the hoplite drew his name. He was the most heavily armed and armored fighter in the ancient world.
In battle, the hoplites would form a phalanx. It was simple enough. Arrayed eight deep, the hoplites would present their shields to the enemy, and through the gaps protruded their spears. This formation, perhaps the most famous in history, was more than simple shield wall. The shield of each hoplite did not protect its wielder, but rather the man to his left. Thus, the men in the phalanx were dependent on each other, not on themselves, for protection. It bound the entire force tightly together, and so discipline and firmness were emphasized, not courage and great acts of killing.
Panic was the greatest enemy of a hoplite army. If one’s comrade broke the phalanx, one would be exposed to the enemy. Entire phalanxes could dissolve and the men in them slaughtered. To combat this, and to help the men maintain formation on the charge, different cities instituted various war cries or music. The Spartans, for example, advanced in perfect silence but for the playing of a flute to keep them in time, terrifying their more boisterous enemies. The Thebans let loose a wild, whooping yell. And the Athenians possessed a terrifying, ululating cry that rose up as they crashed into a foe: “Elelelelele!”
Now that cry, bursting from ten thousand throats, echoed over the field of Marathon.
The phalanx crashed right through the storm of arrows and bolts the Persians threw at them, their heavy bronze easily defeating the attacks. The Persians were shocked – no one had ever made it through that intact before! They frantically began to scramble to erect their defenses, but it was too late. The Athenians plowed into the Persian army before it was ready.
The army of Persia was an amalgamation of all the various nations within the empire. Each fought with its own style – archery, perhaps, like the Medes, or the great axes and metal caps of the Saka, or the long spears of the Persians themselves. They had one thing in common, though: They wore almost no armor. In the East, where cavalry was king, what good was it? Armored men were slow, easily outmaneuvered by quick horsemen. Armor was a liability. Easterners fought with shields of wicker, and leather jerkin or cotton armor. Enough to stop an arrow, or perhaps a slingstone.
Not enough to stop a phalanx head on.
The Athenian army crashed into the first ranks of the Persian force, and immediately plunged several ranks deeper. Their heavy spears, instead of shivering as in a collision of phalanxes, where both sides struggled against the other’s heavy bronze armor, plunged through wicker and leather easily, chewing through flesh in an instant. The barbarians were ground up, unable to make a scratch in the armored wall of bronze now bearing down upon them. Many weren’t even struck with weapons, but were simply crushed by the enormous weight of the Greeks striding ever forward.
Pressed backwards, unable to gain ground to regroup, the Persians on the flanks began to break off and flee backwards towards the ships. In the center, however, where the phalanx was only four rather than eight ranks thick, where the more disciplined Persian spearmen stood, where the wild Saka possessed axes capable of cleaving through a hoplite breastplate, the advance stalled, and the Greeks began to lose ground. However, the men on the flanks, watching their foes flee before them, wheeled inwards, and took the remaining invaders in the flank. The Persians fought on for a while, then also broke, and ran for the ships.
Realizing the battle was not yet won, the Greek generals led their men in pursuit. If the Persian army was able to embark, they could sail to Athens before the army could return, and all would be for naught. The fighting here was more intense than at any other time in the battle. The Greeks fought in amongst the beached ships, stabbing upwards with their spears, defending against missiles hurled from above, all semblance of order gone. The Persians fought desperately to escape, fending men off their ships, thrusting down, attempting to push off. Callimachus, the old general, was killed here. The brother of a man who in later years would become famous as the playwright Aeschylus, Cynaigeirus, was killed when he laid his hand upon a trireme to stop it escaping, and had it struck off with an ax. In the end, seven ships of the Persian fleet of more than six hundred were taken.
No time to rest. It was not yet ten in the morning, but the Persian cavalry had departed several hours before. Athens was not yet safe. The army turned and began to race back over the mountain to get to their city ahead of the Persians. But would they make it in time? What if the city was betrayed, as Eretria was, before the hoplites returned?
The story goes that the Athenians sent famous Philipides on one last run, to stop anyone from selling their city to the barbarians. Philipides raced back over the 26 miles to Athens, after his earlier epic run to Sparta, after his run to the battlefield, after having fought in the battle. Exhausted, stumbling, he reached the city and was met by several elders of the assembly. Collapsing before them, breathless, he gasped out a single word:
“Victory!”
And he died.
The rest of the army, marching hard, was able to arrive several hours later. Bare minutes after their arrival, the first Persian ships glided into the harbor at Phalerum, only to be greeted by an assembly of the entire army of hoplites that had so recently slaughtered their comrades at Marathon. Artaphernes, in command now that Datis had been slain on the field, realized he could not take the city. The Persian fleet sat and stared in disbelief. Hippias the tyrant looked one last time upon his homeland. Then the fleet turned and rowed back out to sea, thence homewards.
In the aftermath of the battle, the Spartans came hurrying up from the Peloponnese, only to be crushingly disappointed that they had missed the entire affair. They marched out to the battlefield to inspect the Persian dead, however. What they saw would have encouraged them. Such weakly armed barbarians would never stand up to Spartan steel!
Marathon was a sea-change for Greece. The battle had cost the Athenians 192 dead, out of their force of 10,000. They were given an honor unprecedented in Athenian history: Rather than being brought back to the city for burial, the 192 were given a magnificent memorial on the field itself. The 6400-odd Persian did were ignobly shoved into a pit and buried en masse. Could men who had lived as slaves all their lives really expect any better? The survivors were heroes in Athens, and would dominate Athenian politics for decades to come. Before, the Mede had always been talked of in tones of hushed fear or awe. Now, after the great victory, men spoke the word “barbarian” with a sneer of contempt. Good Greek men would always be able to beat such effeminate trouser-wearers. Now, for the first time Greeks began to conceive as themselves as inhabiting a continent separate from Asia, one that it seemed natural Greece should rule. From hence, they would define themselves even more than in the past as a people apart, a people special. The consequences of this development would forever shape the succeeding millennia. This was the dawn of Western culture. This was the dawn of the Greek Golden Age. Marathon was the birth cry of Europe.
Thursday, July 17, 2014
Singeing the King of Persia's Beard
Twenty years later, Artaphernes, the man who had struck down Bardiya, could feel well-rewarded for his service. He had been given the stewardship of Sardis, the old capital of Lydia in the west. While it meant dealing the occasional squabble between the Ionian Greek cities, it was as lovely a post as he could have asked for. Sardis, after all, had been the old home of the fabulously wealthy Croesus, and he had lavished his gold upon the city. Even those familiar with mighty Babylon (or the new city Darius was building as a royal capital, Persepolis) could hardly sniff at Sardis. In the center of the city there was an awesome temple to Cybele, a mother goddess who was capable of inspiring such extremes of devotion amongst her followers that they might end up dancing on a mountain side, or writhing in orgies, or (should the festivities be going with a particular swing) hacking off their own testicles.
Beyond the temple, rising in rings like those of Ecbatana, loomed the celebrated walls of Sardis. The largest, and innermost, was so immense that Croesus had believed (erroneously) it to be impregnable. The palace of Croesus was now a brooding stronghold of Persian power. Artaphernes lived like a king.
But he was no king. Darius had come to the throne amidst an inferno of rebellions and uprisings across the empire in the chaos of Bardiya’s revolt, and it had taken him the better part of a decade to fully re-establish his authority over the empire. He had no intention of allowing anyone – brother or not – pretensions of kingship ever again. And so Bardiya was only the “Guardian of the Great King’s Power” – a satrap.
He enforced his will on the fractious Greek cities within his satrapy the only way he could – by using tyrants. He propped up one or another Greek warlord over others, and so made the man dependent on his power. The tyrant, in turn, would keep the city in line and loyal to Persia. It was a sea of miniature Pisistratuses, as it were.
The tyrants were not happy as to the arrangements. They had an unhappily lot. They were often reviled by their own people, utterly dependent on the Great King to prop them up – so they had the choice of ruling as traitors, or being lynched by the mob. Could they ever reassert their independence against the Great King’s power?
In 513, the possibility had become suddenly, tantalizingly real. Darius had rolled in to Sardis with a vast army. He was bound to Thrace, and then north of the Danube – through modern Bulgaria into what is now Romania – to fight and conquer the barbarian tribes there. Since coming to the throne 9 years previously Darius had proclaimed it the mission of Persia to bring all people under the reign of Ahura-Mazda and Truth. To be a slave of the Great King was to be free from the Lie.
Darius had conscripted the tyrants of Ionia for his project, and ordered them to provide ships for his fleet, which would help the army cross the Danube and keep it supplied in the field. This they did.
Now, however, some of the Ionians whispered of treason. Miltiades, the Athenian aristocrat who had been driven out of his home city by Pisistratus, and had conquered the Hellespont and established himself as tyrant there, argued that this was their chance. Should the Ionian fleet abandon the project and sail home, Darius would be trapped on the wrong side of the river, without supplies, in barbarian lands, and with the winter coming on. But reason had prevailed – the tyrants could not betray the man whom they owed their positions and their lives, argued Histaeus, the tyrant of Miletus. The tyrants embraced Histaeus’s view and not Miltiades, decided not to betray Darius, and duly welcomed the Great King upon his return.
That was ten years ago. Now, it was 500, and the specter of revolt came again.
A man by the name of Aristagoras, the tyrant of Miletus, successor to his father Histaeus, in an attempt to improve his standings with Artaphernes in Sardis, was able to convince the Persian on a joint venture to conquer the island of Naxos, midway across the Aegean.
The enterprise had not gone well, however – Aristagoras, the commander of the fleet, had had a falling out with the Persian commander, and the siege had failed. Aristagoras, fearing that if he returned empty handed he would lose his position and his life, embarked on a different course.
The citizens of Miletus had always been notoriously rambunctious. They had followed the recent upheaval and revolt in Athens as closely as all the islands of the Aegean. For years, they had demanded an overthrow to the tyrants, an end to the rule of the barbarian, and the establishment of democracy. Aristagoras, arriving back in his city, took to the streets. He issued a call for revolt, and the establishment of democracy, as well – and the citizens enthusiastically supported him. He brought with him almost the entire fleet of Ionia, the entire Persian naval strength in the waters. The commander of the expedition naturally protested, but was trapped on the island. The citizens fell on him and his soldiers, slaughtering them. Aristagoras dispatched ships to mainland Greece and to Ionia to raise allies, and began planning for an expedition to Sardis to destroy the Persian regional capital and so win Greek freedom.
The Ionian Revolt, whose consequences would shape millennia, had begun.
When the messengers arrived in Athens, they were greeted enthusiastically by the young democracy. The Athenians were fresh from their triumph over the alliance of Thebans, Spartans, and Euboeans, and so were perhaps a bit more reckless than they otherwise would have been. Why shouldn’t Greek cities live freely, as was the natural order of things? Why not establish democracy – friendly, grateful democracies no doubt! – across the Ionian, instead of the rule of the barbarian? Could the effeminate, trouser-wearing Persians really stand against good Greek men? The Athenians, and their colony in Euboea, called Eretria, enthusiastically voted to send aid to Miletus. Sparta refused, wanting to focus on its rivals within the Peloponnese. And so it was that 20 Athenian and Eretrian ships sailed to attack the mightiest empire in the world.
At first, things went well. The allied armies of Athens, Eretria, and the cities of Ionia drove back the Persians into their capital of Sardis. The allies then stormed the city and put it to the torch. However, Artaphernes had managed to flee with most of the garrison to the mighty acropolis, where the citadel of Croesus still stood. Unable to take the citadel, and with Persian reinforcements approaching, the Greeks fell back towards Miletus. Artaphernes pursued, gathering with him the famous Lydian cavalry, still the best in the world. At Ephesus, three days march from Miletus, he caught up to the Greeks and fell upon them. Many Athenians fell. Soured on the entire enterprise by these unexpected casualties, the democracy withdrew, becoming stubbornly isolationist and refusing any more entreaties for aid from the rebels.
Nevertheless, the sparks of revolution, which Artaphernes had been frantically trying to suppress, now flared into open flames following the sack of Sardis. The entire coast of Asia Minor, and the Greek cities on the island of Cyprus to the east, rose up against their Persian masters.
The wrath of the Great King, Darius, was terrible. He gathered an enormous army and put it under the command of his brother, Artaphernes, and called out the navies of Tyre, Sidon, and Egypt, whose 600 ships were twice the number of the Ionians. And, for the next six years, the Ionians were systematically destroyed. Cyprus was the first to be crushed, and afterwards each city on the coast followed. They didn’t stand a chance. The Persian Empire at this time encompassed the land areas of modern Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Darius did not concern himself with only his own rebellious subjects, however. He did not forget who was responsible for the burning of Sardis, one of the greatest cities of his empire. Three times a day, at every meal, he paid a servant to whisper in his ear, “Master, remember the Athenians!” He would.
At last, after six years, the battered, rotting Ionian fleet was harbored at Lade, near Miletus, the final city to be attacked. There, they prepared for one last attempt to stop the Persian fleet in the narrow straits, where their numbers would count for nothing.
It was not to be. The commander of the contingent from Samos, as the Persians approached, ordered his fleet to withdraw – 70 ships. He felt the battle was already lost, and his actions ensured the result. Next the ships of Lesbos, seeing their comrades fleeing, also pulled out of line, another 60 ships gone. The fleet fell apart into squabbling and dissension, and so the Persians rowed to the attack.
The Ionian fleet was annihilated. The Milesians fought to the death. So, too, did 11 ships of Samos which disobeyed the order to withdraw. No quarter was asked or given, and at the end of the day, the Ionian fleet lay at the bottom of the sea or scattered across its face. With its death, so too died the Ionian revolt. Miletus was sacked, its inhabitants slaughtered, or carried off into slavery deep within the Persian Empire. A play on the subject, performed the next year in Athens’ City Dionysa, reduced the entire auditorium to tears.
Now, the eyes of the Great King turned across the sea, to the infant democracy. “Master, remember the Athenians!”
Beyond the temple, rising in rings like those of Ecbatana, loomed the celebrated walls of Sardis. The largest, and innermost, was so immense that Croesus had believed (erroneously) it to be impregnable. The palace of Croesus was now a brooding stronghold of Persian power. Artaphernes lived like a king.
But he was no king. Darius had come to the throne amidst an inferno of rebellions and uprisings across the empire in the chaos of Bardiya’s revolt, and it had taken him the better part of a decade to fully re-establish his authority over the empire. He had no intention of allowing anyone – brother or not – pretensions of kingship ever again. And so Bardiya was only the “Guardian of the Great King’s Power” – a satrap.
He enforced his will on the fractious Greek cities within his satrapy the only way he could – by using tyrants. He propped up one or another Greek warlord over others, and so made the man dependent on his power. The tyrant, in turn, would keep the city in line and loyal to Persia. It was a sea of miniature Pisistratuses, as it were.
The tyrants were not happy as to the arrangements. They had an unhappily lot. They were often reviled by their own people, utterly dependent on the Great King to prop them up – so they had the choice of ruling as traitors, or being lynched by the mob. Could they ever reassert their independence against the Great King’s power?
In 513, the possibility had become suddenly, tantalizingly real. Darius had rolled in to Sardis with a vast army. He was bound to Thrace, and then north of the Danube – through modern Bulgaria into what is now Romania – to fight and conquer the barbarian tribes there. Since coming to the throne 9 years previously Darius had proclaimed it the mission of Persia to bring all people under the reign of Ahura-Mazda and Truth. To be a slave of the Great King was to be free from the Lie.
Darius had conscripted the tyrants of Ionia for his project, and ordered them to provide ships for his fleet, which would help the army cross the Danube and keep it supplied in the field. This they did.
Now, however, some of the Ionians whispered of treason. Miltiades, the Athenian aristocrat who had been driven out of his home city by Pisistratus, and had conquered the Hellespont and established himself as tyrant there, argued that this was their chance. Should the Ionian fleet abandon the project and sail home, Darius would be trapped on the wrong side of the river, without supplies, in barbarian lands, and with the winter coming on. But reason had prevailed – the tyrants could not betray the man whom they owed their positions and their lives, argued Histaeus, the tyrant of Miletus. The tyrants embraced Histaeus’s view and not Miltiades, decided not to betray Darius, and duly welcomed the Great King upon his return.
That was ten years ago. Now, it was 500, and the specter of revolt came again.
A man by the name of Aristagoras, the tyrant of Miletus, successor to his father Histaeus, in an attempt to improve his standings with Artaphernes in Sardis, was able to convince the Persian on a joint venture to conquer the island of Naxos, midway across the Aegean.
The enterprise had not gone well, however – Aristagoras, the commander of the fleet, had had a falling out with the Persian commander, and the siege had failed. Aristagoras, fearing that if he returned empty handed he would lose his position and his life, embarked on a different course.
The citizens of Miletus had always been notoriously rambunctious. They had followed the recent upheaval and revolt in Athens as closely as all the islands of the Aegean. For years, they had demanded an overthrow to the tyrants, an end to the rule of the barbarian, and the establishment of democracy. Aristagoras, arriving back in his city, took to the streets. He issued a call for revolt, and the establishment of democracy, as well – and the citizens enthusiastically supported him. He brought with him almost the entire fleet of Ionia, the entire Persian naval strength in the waters. The commander of the expedition naturally protested, but was trapped on the island. The citizens fell on him and his soldiers, slaughtering them. Aristagoras dispatched ships to mainland Greece and to Ionia to raise allies, and began planning for an expedition to Sardis to destroy the Persian regional capital and so win Greek freedom.
The Ionian Revolt, whose consequences would shape millennia, had begun.
When the messengers arrived in Athens, they were greeted enthusiastically by the young democracy. The Athenians were fresh from their triumph over the alliance of Thebans, Spartans, and Euboeans, and so were perhaps a bit more reckless than they otherwise would have been. Why shouldn’t Greek cities live freely, as was the natural order of things? Why not establish democracy – friendly, grateful democracies no doubt! – across the Ionian, instead of the rule of the barbarian? Could the effeminate, trouser-wearing Persians really stand against good Greek men? The Athenians, and their colony in Euboea, called Eretria, enthusiastically voted to send aid to Miletus. Sparta refused, wanting to focus on its rivals within the Peloponnese. And so it was that 20 Athenian and Eretrian ships sailed to attack the mightiest empire in the world.
At first, things went well. The allied armies of Athens, Eretria, and the cities of Ionia drove back the Persians into their capital of Sardis. The allies then stormed the city and put it to the torch. However, Artaphernes had managed to flee with most of the garrison to the mighty acropolis, where the citadel of Croesus still stood. Unable to take the citadel, and with Persian reinforcements approaching, the Greeks fell back towards Miletus. Artaphernes pursued, gathering with him the famous Lydian cavalry, still the best in the world. At Ephesus, three days march from Miletus, he caught up to the Greeks and fell upon them. Many Athenians fell. Soured on the entire enterprise by these unexpected casualties, the democracy withdrew, becoming stubbornly isolationist and refusing any more entreaties for aid from the rebels.
Nevertheless, the sparks of revolution, which Artaphernes had been frantically trying to suppress, now flared into open flames following the sack of Sardis. The entire coast of Asia Minor, and the Greek cities on the island of Cyprus to the east, rose up against their Persian masters.
The wrath of the Great King, Darius, was terrible. He gathered an enormous army and put it under the command of his brother, Artaphernes, and called out the navies of Tyre, Sidon, and Egypt, whose 600 ships were twice the number of the Ionians. And, for the next six years, the Ionians were systematically destroyed. Cyprus was the first to be crushed, and afterwards each city on the coast followed. They didn’t stand a chance. The Persian Empire at this time encompassed the land areas of modern Turkey, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, Kyrgyzstan, Pakistan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, and Afghanistan. Darius did not concern himself with only his own rebellious subjects, however. He did not forget who was responsible for the burning of Sardis, one of the greatest cities of his empire. Three times a day, at every meal, he paid a servant to whisper in his ear, “Master, remember the Athenians!” He would.
At last, after six years, the battered, rotting Ionian fleet was harbored at Lade, near Miletus, the final city to be attacked. There, they prepared for one last attempt to stop the Persian fleet in the narrow straits, where their numbers would count for nothing.
It was not to be. The commander of the contingent from Samos, as the Persians approached, ordered his fleet to withdraw – 70 ships. He felt the battle was already lost, and his actions ensured the result. Next the ships of Lesbos, seeing their comrades fleeing, also pulled out of line, another 60 ships gone. The fleet fell apart into squabbling and dissension, and so the Persians rowed to the attack.
The Ionian fleet was annihilated. The Milesians fought to the death. So, too, did 11 ships of Samos which disobeyed the order to withdraw. No quarter was asked or given, and at the end of the day, the Ionian fleet lay at the bottom of the sea or scattered across its face. With its death, so too died the Ionian revolt. Miletus was sacked, its inhabitants slaughtered, or carried off into slavery deep within the Persian Empire. A play on the subject, performed the next year in Athens’ City Dionysa, reduced the entire auditorium to tears.
Now, the eyes of the Great King turned across the sea, to the infant democracy. “Master, remember the Athenians!”
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