Aristagoras stood down, nominally, as tyrant of Miletus and introduced democratic institutions (isonomia is used again here), which was what the Milesians wanted; he also persuaded the other cities of Ionia to follow suit. Only the geographer and historian Hecataeus, one of several ground-breaking intellectuals active in Ionia at that time, advised against taking on the might of Persia. Presciently, he argued that only control of the sea would give Aristagoras any chance of success. Aristagoras did know that he was in need of strong allies and Sparta was his first port of call:
Cleomenes was still king when Aristagoras, tyrant of Miletus, came to Sparta. When he went to speak with the king, the Lacedaemonians tell me that he had with him a bronze plate engraved with a map of the whole earth including all the seas and rivers.1 Aristagoras began the conversation, saying, ‘Do not let my eagerness to come here surprise you, Cleomenes, for look at what has come to pass! The sons of Ionia are slaves rather than free men, and this shames us and causes us great sorrow. And it must be the same for you, surely, above all the rest of the Hellenes, because you are the leading power of Hellas. Now, in the name of Hellas’ gods, I call upon you to deliver your Ionian kinsmen2 from slavery. This is a thing you can easily achieve, for your fighting qualities are superlative and the Barbarians are not brave at all. They go into battle with bows and short spears, wearing trousers and with soft bonnets on their heads, so they can be easily beaten. Also, the people who live in those lands possess more in the way of assets than the entire population of the rest of the world: gold, for a start, and silver and bronze, the finest clothing, and beasts of burden and slaves. All this can be yours if you wish. Let me show you where these peoples live in the order you would encounter them. Next to the Ionians are the Lydians, very wealthy and dwelling in a fair land.’
And, as he spoke he pointed to the map of the world he had brought with him, engraved on a bronze plate. ‘Look here to the east of the Lydians. Here are the Phrygians with more livestock and better crops than any people I know of. Next to them are the Cappadocians, whom we call Syrians, and their neighbours the Cilicians, whose land stretches to the ocean here, where the island of Cyprus lies; the yearly tribute the Cilicians pay to the King is 500 talents.3 After the Cilicians come the Armenians, another people rich in livestock, and then the Matieni, whose country you can see here. Next, we have the land of Cissia and, here, Susa on the banks of the River Choaspes where the Great King has his residence.4 The treasure-houses of his wealth are there and, if you take that city, you can be assured that your wealth will rival the riches of Zeus.
‘Now surely the time has come for you to cease fighting for small patches of valueless land with narrow borders, to cease fighting with the Messenians,5 who are a match for you in battle, and with the Arcadians and the Argives. These people possess neither gold nor silver, none of that treasure for which men are driven by desire to fight and die. Given this opportunity to become master of all of Asia with ease, what other choice do you have?’
That is what Aristagoras said, and Cleomenes replied, ‘Milesian guest-friend,6 I will put off answering you till the day after tomorrow,’ and that was as far as they took things. On the day set for Cleomenes to give his answer they met as agreed and Cleomenes asked Aristagoras how many days’ march it was from the Ionian Sea7 to where the Great King lived. So far, Aristagoras had been clever and misled Cleomenes completely, but at this point he slipped up. He should never have answered with the truth if he wanted to bring the Spartans into Asia, but he did, and said that it was three months’ march inland. At that Cleomenes cut off Aristagoras before he could start his detailed description of the journey, saying, ‘Leave Sparta before sunset, Milesian guest-friend. You may wish to lead the Lacedaemonians off on a three-month march8 from the sea, but there is nothing you can say that will persuade them to follow you.’ (5.49–50)
Aristagoras made a final attempt to persuade Cleomenes, approaching him as a supplicant to be on the safe side and offering larger and larger bribes. According to Herodotus the king’s eight-year-old daughter was with him and brought the discussion to an end:
‘Father!’ she exclaimed, ‘Your guest-friend is going to corrupt you if you don’t get away from him.’ Cleomenes liked the child’s advice and went off into another room, and Aristagoras left Sparta there and then. (5.51)
He went to Athens next:
The Athenians were already on bad terms with Persia when Aristagoras the Milesian arrived in their city after being ejected from Sparta by Cleomenes the Lacedaemonian. He had come there because Athens was the next most powerful city after Sparta. He stood before the people9 and gave the same speech as he had given in Sparta, describing the riches of Asia and declaring that the Persians could be easily defeated because they did not fight with the hoplite shield or spear. He said all this and also pointed out that the Milesians had been settlers from Athens,10 and that it was right and proper for the Athenians to come to their aid with their great power. In his desperation there was nothing he did not offer, and he finally convinced the Athenians. It really does seem to be easier to deceive a crowd than a single man. Aristagoras could not deceive Cleomenes of Lacedaemon, one single individual, but he succeeded with 30,00011 Athenians. So led astray, the Athenians voted to send 20 ships to support the Ionians and put Melanthius, a citizen of excellent reputation,12 in command. Those ships were the origin of the great troubles that were to affect Hellenes and Barbarians alike. (5.97)
This episode is coloured by Herodotus’ wish to lay responsibility for ‘the great troubles’ that were now in store on Aristagoras, and by his low opinion of the man’s character. He shows him deviously underplaying Persian military might, making only a passing reference to their archery and no mention of their cavalry, vast manpower or immense navy. However, Hellenes did generally consider the bow an unmanly weapon, and trousers effeminate, and Aristagoras does correctly present the Barbarian spear as inferior to the longer hoplite weapon. But Persia’s almost unbroken run of military success over the preceding half-century should have conveyed a more intimidating message and this could have been reinforced by the experiences of the many Hellenes who had fought as mercenaries or levies alongside or against Persians in the Great Kings’ various campaigns.
In any case, Aristagoras’ geography lecture and alleged attempt to bribe Cleomenes backfired as far as the Spartan king was concerned. But, as Herodotus drily observes, the Athenians, flexing their democratic rights in their quite recently instituted Assembly, were easily gulled. On the other hand, it could be reasonably argued that their decision, misguided as it was in strategic terms, was a principled one, to join kindred Ionians in a fight against an enemy of freedom that had already reached out half-way across the Aegean in its attempt on Naxos. Their commitment of a little more than 4,000 men, including a few hundred hoplites, was not a massive proportion of their total manpower, but the 20 ships probably represented close to half of their navy. The manpower commitment would have been smaller if some or all of the ships were smaller than triremes with their complement of 200–230 oarsmen, sailors, hoplites and archers.
The Athenians arrived at Miletus with their 20 ships and with them came five triremes13 from Eretria. The Eretrians were not campaigning with the Athenians out of goodwill towards them but to repay the Milesians for being their allies in an earlier war that they had fought against Chalcis,14 when the Samians sided with the Chalcidians against the Eretrians and Milesians. So, when they and the rest of his allies had arrived, Aristagoras launched his attack on Sardis. However, he did not go off to fight himself but stayed behind and appointed two other Milesians as generals, his own brother Charopinus and a fellow citizen named Hermophantus. On reaching Ephesus with this force, the Ionians left their ships at Coresus in Ephesian territory and marched inland with a large body of men, enlisting Ephesians to be their guides. They followed the River Cayster, crossed Mount Tmolus and came to Sardis. They captured the city without any opposition, all of it except for its acropolis, which was occupied by Artaphernes himself with a substantial garrison. But the Hellenes were unable to plunder the city they had taken. A lot of the houses in Sardis were built entirely of reeds and those that were built of bricks had thatched roofs. A soldier set one of these buildings on fire and the blaze went from house to house until it had spread over the whole city. With the city burning and its outskirts all ablaze, the Lydians and those of the Persians who were with them had no way of escape. So they all streamed down to the marketplace and the banks of the Pactolus. (This river carries gold dust15 from Mount Tmolus and flows through the marketplace, eventually joining the Hermus, which runs down to the sea.) The Lydians and Persians, now massed in the marketplace, had no option but to stand and fight and when the Ionians saw that the enemy was going to put up a fight, and that many more were coming up in support, they took fright and fell back on Mount Tmolus. Then they set off back to their ships under cover of night. So, Sardis was burned and in it the temple of Cybele,16 the mother-goddess worshipped there, an act which was to become the Persians’ justification for destroying the holy places they later burned in Greece.
When the Persians who lived to the west of the River Halys heard what was happening, they gathered together and marched to support the Lydians. Finding the Ionians gone from Sardis they followed their trail and caught up with them at Ephesus. The Ionians formed up and faced them but suffered a severe defeat in the battle that followed and the Persians killed many of them, some of them famous, including Eualcides, commander of the Eretrians, a prizewinning athlete much praised by Simonides of Ceos.17 Those who managed to escape from the battlefield scattered, each to their own city, and that was the end of the fighting there. Afterwards the Athenians completely abandoned the Ionians and refused to help them in any way, although Aristagoras sent many pleading messages. However, despite the loss of their alliance with the Athenians, the Ionians did not draw back from war with the Great King because they had already gone so far in their actions against him. They sailed to the Hellespont and took control of Byzantium and all the other cities in that region and then went on from the Hellespont and brought most of Caria over to their side. Even the city of Caunus,18 which had previously refused to be part of the alliance, now joined it after the burning of Sardis. (5.97–103)
The bold, even foolhardy Hellene attack on Sardis seems to have taken Artaphernes completely by surprise. His ‘substantial garrison’ was clearly strong enough to see off the Hellenes when it actually confronted them, and the most appropriate course of action would have been to meet them outside the city, rather than to wait for them to lay siege to the acropolis. The unplanned fire may have been more of an immediate problem for the attackers than the defenders, who would presumably have been safe inside the citadel walls on the heights above the city. The spreading blaze forced the Hellenes to gather in the open spaces by the river, enabling the Persians and Lydians to assess their strength and concentrate their forces to attack them en masse. When the Hellenes withdrew, the Persians and Lydians, reinforced from further inland, regrouped and caught up with the rebels before they could board their ships. They now clearly outnumbered the Hellenes and the speed of their pursuit suggests there was a strong cavalry element. Herodotus’ only quantification of the forces involved is the 25 ships from Athens and Eretria. Their withdrawal probably did not significantly weaken the rebels, who were able to muster over 350 triremes four years later. But the early loss of their only support from the heartland must have been a blow to morale. There could have been a swift change of political mood in Athens with a desire to appease rather than provoke the Great King, but that was no longer possible.
When word came to Darius that Sardis had been taken and burnt by the Athenians and Ionians, and that Aristagoras the Milesian had led the conspirators who had hatched the plot, it is said that he was unconcerned about the Ionians because he knew they would not escape punishment for this rebellion. But he asked who these Athenians were, and, when he had been told, called for his bow. He took it, put an arrow to the string and shot it into the sky, and, as it soared up, he said this prayer: ‘O Zeus, grant me vengeance on the Athenians.’ And after doing this he gave orders that one of his servants should say to him three times whenever his dinner was set before him, ‘Master, remember the Athenians.’ (5.105)
It is unlikely that Darius needed to be told who the Athenians were, pleasing as the echo is of Cyrus’ reaction to his decades-earlier encounter with the Spartans. He probably already knew that they had reneged on their offer of earth and water to Artaphernes, and very likely knew about their subsequent refusal to reinstate Hippias, even if the ex-tyrant had less access to him than Herodotus suggests. The King’s dramatic oath has a ring of truth to it, however. He is calling on Ahura Mazda, the principal god of the Persians, regarded by the Hellenes as one and the same as Zeus. Ahura Mazda was actually an altogether more sophisticated divine being than the head of the Hellenes’ chaotic pantheon, but the two shared roots in the ancient Indo-European tradition of a supreme sky-god. The bow, symbolic of Persian military might, was an important piece of the Great King’s regalia and shooting an arrow into the sky sealed the oath powerfully.
In spite of their early setback the Ionians had quickly spread insurrection north to the Bosporus and south throughout Caria. Then all but one of the ten major cities of Cyprus rebelled, and Cyprus had been a rich and important imperial asset since the reign of Cambyses. The Ionian Revolt was no longer purely an Ionian affair, if it ever was. Since both the Carians and the Cypriots were as Asian as they were Hellene, it had become rather more than an irritating disturbance in a cluster of subject cities on one limited frontier. So Cyprus and the strategically important Hellespont region became higher priorities than Ionia. In the meantime, Histiaeus managed to persuade Darius to allow him to return home on the pretext that he would restore order. He disingenuously undertook to deliver Aristagoras for punishment, if it proved to be the case that he and the Milesians were responsible for the rebellion, and into the bargain he made a ridiculous promise to bring Sardinia, recently annexed by Carthage, into the Persian Empire.
Operations to put down the rebellion took place simultaneously in more than one theatre from 498 onwards. Herodotus does not give any precise chronology, but he deals with the suppression of Cyprus first. The Cypriots called on the Ionians for support and they sent a fleet, but declined to join in any fighting on land. The Persians had shipped a large army over from Cilicia supported by a Phoenician fleet and the two sides faced each other on the south side of the island by the city of Salamis on land and offshore:
When the Persian army arrived on the plain of Salamis, the Cypriot kings19 formed up their battle line. They placed the best of the Salaminians and Solians20 opposite the Persians with the remaining Cypriots facing the rest of the enemy. Onesilus, the Cypriot commander-in-chief, took up position opposite Artybius, the Persian commander. Now, Artybius was mounted on a horse that was trained to rear up when facing a hoplite on foot. Onesilus knew about this and said to his attendant,21 a Carian by birth and a famous warrior of great courage, ‘I understand that Artybius’ horse rears up and uses his hoofs and teeth to kill any man he comes up against. With this in mind, tell me which of the two you would prefer to take on, the horse or Artybius himself.’ His attendant replied, ‘I am ready to take on either or both, as your majesty wishes, but I will tell you what I think is most appropriate from your point of view. I say that it is right for a king and commander to fight a king and commander. For if the man you strike down is a commander, you do a great deed, and if, on the other hand, that man strikes you down (let this not be so!), your misfortune is halved because your death is at the hands of a worthy opponent. And it is right for a servant to fight a servant, or a horse. So don’t worry about this horse’s tricks. I guarantee he will never again rear up over any man!’ This was his response, and immediately afterwards the opposing forces engaged on land and sea.
The Ionian fleet was superb that day and defeated the Phoenicians, and the Samians fought best of all, and while this fight was going on, the two armies on shore swept together in battle. As for the two commanders, when Artybius the Persian astride his horse charged at Onesilus, the Cypriot followed the plan he had agreed with his attendant and aimed a thrust at him. The horse reared up and kicked out at Onesilus’ shield and the Carian sliced off its hindlegs with one stroke of his billhook.22 That is how Artybius the Persian commander met his end, he and his horse. While the rest were still fighting, Stesenor the ruler of Curium, which is said to be an Argive settlement, deserted with the substantial force under his command and, when the Curians deserted, the war-chariots of Salamis did the same. And so the Persians gained the upper hand over the Cypriots, and their army was routed with many slain. Onesilus son of Chersis, who had instigated the rebellion in Cyprus, and the king of the Solians, Aristocyprus son of Philocyprus, were among the dead. (5.112–13)
Herodotus’ tantalizingly brief account of this significant land-battle and the single combat between the two commanders has an exotic and epic flavour. However, the cities of Cyprus were capable of mustering a large army, many thousands strong. Herodotus tells us that their infantry equipment was Hellene in style except for the headgear: ‘the kings wrapped turbans round their heads, the rest wore felt caps’ (7.90). This could be counted as another victory for Asian cavalry, and medium and light infantry, over western-style heavy troops, and the Persians could reasonably consider it a better test than the battle outside Ephesus. It is the only battle in which Herodotus mentions the involvement of chariots, though elsewhere he notes that the Libyan element of the imperial Persian army included them in place of cavalry. At this time the chariot was used as an archery platform rather than as a shock weapon. That appears to have come later when the Persians developed the scythed chariot towards the end of the 5th century.
It is disappointing that Herodotus has so little to say about the simultaneous sea-battle. Two years later the rebels faced the Persians with over 350 triremes, 60 of them from Samos, but there is no indication of their strength on this occasion. It is possible that the Phoenicians, from the Mediterranean’s finest navy, were simply outnumbered here. However, with the Cypriots defeated on land, the Ionians could not exploit their victory, whatever its scale, and so sailed home. Nonetheless, it is surprising that Herodotus, with his liking for coincidences and portents, makes so little of this earlier Hellene naval victory near a place called Salamis.
All the cities of Cyprus that had rebelled were subsequently besieged and taken:
Soli held out the longest but the Persians tunnelled under its outer wall and took it after five months. And so the Cypriots, after one year of freedom, were made slaves again. (5.115–16)
At this point Herodotus jumps back to operations on the mainland immediately after the burning of Sardis:
The Persian generals Daurises, Hymaees, and Otanes, all of them married to daughters of Darius, pursued the Ionians who had marched on Sardis and drove them back to their ships. After this victory they divided the rebel cities between them and sacked them. Daurises set off for the cities of the Hellespont and took Dardanus, Abydos, Percote, Lampsacus, and Paisus, each in a single day. Then, as he marched from Paisus against Parium, word came to him that the Carians had joined up with the Ionians and risen against the Persians. So he turned back from the Hellespont and marched his army to Caria. (5.116–17)
It seems that the Persians had quickly regained full control of the Bosporus and Hellespont sea-lanes allowing Daurises to abandon operations to suppress the rebels on the Asian shore and to make the march of several hundred kilometres to the south to deal with Caria, presumably linking up with his brothers-in-law:
The Carians managed to find out about Daurises’ approach ahead of his arrival, and when they had this information, they gathered at a place called White Pillars23 on the River Marsyas which flows from the land around Idrias and joins the Maeander. When they had mustered there, many and various plans were proposed. The best of these, in my judgement, was suggested by Pixodarus of Cindye, the son of Mausolus24 and husband of the daughter of Syennesis, king of Cilicia. His idea was that the Carians should cross the Maeander and fight with the river at their backs so that with retreat impossible they would have no option but to stand their ground and fight even more bravely than it was in their nature to do. But this idea was rejected and the decision was taken that the Persians, not the Carians, should fight with the Maeander at their backs, the purpose being that if the Persians were defeated and put to flight, they would be hurled into the river, never to return home.
When the Persians had come up and crossed the Maeander, the Carians engaged them by the River Marsyas and fought long and hard, but in the end they were overcome by superior numbers. About 2,000 Persians fell, but close on 10,000 Carians. The Carians who got away were penned into a large sacred grove of plane trees, the sanctuary of Zeus at Labraunda. Trapped as they were, they discussed what action might give them the best prospect of saving themselves, whether they would be better off surrendering to the Persians, or simply abandoning Asia. But whilst this debate was going on, the Milesians and their allies arrived to reinforce them and the Carians immediately set these thoughts aside and prepared to do battle all over again. They charged the Persians, engaged with them, fought a second time and were more severely beaten than before. The whole army sustained many casualties and the Milesians suffered most of all. However, the Carians recovered from this setback and carried on the fight. For example, having discovered that the Persians were launching a campaign against their cities, they set an ambush on the Pedasus road and the Persians fell into the trap and were wiped out with all their generals, including Daurises, in a night attack. The ambush force was commanded by Heraclides from Mylasa. (5.118–21)
Two of Caria’s most important cities, Cnidus and Halicarnassus, had been founded as Hellene settlements centuries before, and Herodotus associates his ancient compatriots with the evolution of hoplite equipment. He credits them with teaching the Greeks how to fix plumes on their helmets and paint blazons on their shields, and with the invention of the revolutionary hoplite shield-grip system. He also tells of the impression hoplites made when they raided Egypt in the 7th century: ‘an Egyptian who had never seen men in bronze armour before reported that “men of bronze” had arrived from the sea and were plundering the land’ (2.152). In the early 5th century ‘the Carians’ equipment was Hellene except for their billhooks and daggers’ (7.93). The Milesians, who joined them at Labraunda, were probably conventionally equipped hoplites. There would have been light-armed support alongside the hoplites but, it seems, no cavalry. Herodotus’ generously rounded and most likely inflated casualty figure of 10,000 suggests a substantial force, which Caria and Miletus together were capable of mustering. Apart from stating that the Persians outnumbered them in the initial clash, Herodotus offers even less information about the force the rebels faced in these two battles. It probably outnumbered them quite significantly and consisted of a core of Persian and Median infantry and cavalry with levies from Lydia and other adjacent territories that had remained loyal. The Lydians, ‘armed very much like the Hellenes’, would have been a better match for the rebel hoplites in close quarter-fighting than the less heavily armed Persians and Medes. The Carians appear to have been led by committee without a formally or informally recognized commander-in-chief, and their decision to let the Persians make an unopposed crossing of the Maeander was as poor tactically as the suggestion that they fight with the river at their backs. As it turned out, the Marsyas probably complicated their retreat after the first battle, which was fought between the two rivers. The Milesian reinforcements were clearly not sufficient to give the Carian survivors a better chance in the second battle.
Caria may have held out for two or three more years till 493, and this final episode recorded by Herodotus suggests that the conflict became ‘asymmetric’ after Labraunda. However, the defeat at Pedasa, the Persians’ only defeat on land in the whole of the Ionian Revolt, must have set counter-insurgency operations back for a while. The fact that the Carian commander was from the leading non-Hellene city in the region may indicate that the forces involved were significant, but it is equally possible that the Persian generals were caught travelling with only a modest escort.
At this point Artaphernes became directly involved and, with the general Otanes, campaigned west from Sardis and retook the important coastal cities of Clazomenae and Cyme. Herodotus brings Aristagoras into his narrative for the last time, making his opinion of him very clear:
With these cities fallen, the Milesian demonstrated what a feeble character he was. For, seeing the great chaos and upheaval he had brought upon Ionia, he now began to plan his own escape, realising that he could not possibly get the better of Darius. (5.124)
He offered to take his followers to Myrcinus, the Thracian city that Darius had given to Histiaeus as a reward for his services in the Danube campaign, or to Sardinia, where he proposed to found a colony. However, it is unlikely that the Carthaginians would have made him welcome in Sardinia. The wise Hecataeus recommended retreating to the nearby island of Leros, fortifying it and waiting there for better times in Miletus:
That was Hecataeus’ advice, but Aristagoras thought it best to take himself off to Myrcinus. So, he accordingly entrusted Miletus to an eminent citizen called Pythagoras25 and sailed to Thrace taking along any who would join him, and set himself up in that place as he had planned. But campaigning out of Myrcinus, he and his whole army were wiped out by the Thracians while laying siege to a town, even though the Thracians inside were willing to agree a truce and give it up. (5.126)
Aristagoras’ co-conspirator, Histiaeus, still trusted by Darius and sent from Susa to assist in the resolution of the Ionian conflict, found it rather harder to deceive Artaphernes in Sardis:
Artaphernes, who had accurate information about the insurrection, saw through his fabrications and said, ‘This is how things are, Histiaeus: you cobbled the sandals and Aristagoras strapped them on.’ (6.1)
Histiaeus slipped out of Sardis that night and was able to secure enough support amongst the Ionians to pursue his personal goal of reinstatement as tyrant of Miletus. But the Milesians had no desire for this and beat off his attempt to take the city back in a night attack. He was in communication with various Persians with whom he had already plotted, but Artaphernes intercepted the messages and had the conspirators executed. Now Histiaeus had lost most of the support he had built up in the region, but he was able to persuade the Mytileneans of Lesbos to give him eight triremes. He took these to Byzantium and used them for piracy in the Hellespont.
Dealing with Histiaeus was not Artaphernes’ highest priority:
A large Barbarian army and fleet were now bearing down on Miletus. The Persian generals had consolidated all their resources into a single task force and were leading this against that city; the rest of the rebel strongholds were a lower priority. In the fleet, the Phoenicians were the most highly motivated, but the recently subdued Cypriots and the Cilicians and the Egyptians were deployed with them. This assault on Miletus was, in effect, an attack on the whole of Ionia, and when the Ionians learned of this, each city sent delegates to the Panionium.26 They gathered there and conferred, and they resolved that they should not assemble an army to confront the Persians on land, but that the Milesians should defend themselves from inside their city walls while the rest of them manned all their ships, not leaving a single one in port. They were to assemble as soon as possible at Lade, a small island lying just off Miletus, and mount a seaborne defence of the city from there. And so the Ionians, including the Aeolians who lived on Lesbos,27 manned their ships and came to Lade.
The Hellene battle order was as follows: the Milesians brought 80 ships and were positioned on the right wing; next to them were the Prieneans with 12 ships, and the Myesians with three; next to the Myesians were the Teans with 17 ships and, next to them, the Chians with 100; then came the Erythraeans, who brought eight ships, and the Phocaeans with three; then there were the 70 ships from Lesbos and finally the Samians, positioned on the left wing with 60. In total there were 353 triremes. So that was the Ionian fleet. The Barbarians had 600 ships. When they reached Miletus and the land army had also arrived, the Persian commanders found out how many Ionian ships there were and became worried that they were not there in enough strength to defeat the Hellenes. They knew that if they did not have control of the sea, they would not be able to take Miletus,28 and would then face the threat of punishment by Darius. With this in mind, they gathered together the Ionian tyrants who had been removed from their positions by Aristagoras of Miletus and had taken refuge with the Medes, and had, as it happened, joined them on campaign against Miletus. The Persians summoned them all and said, ‘Men of Ionia, now is the time for you to show how you can be of good service to the House of the Great King by endeavouring to detach your countrymen from the rebel alliance. Make them this promise: if they are so persuaded by you, they shall not suffer punishment for their rebellion: their holy places and property shall not be burnt; nor shall they be treated any more strictly than before. But if they do not comply and are set on fighting, then deliver this threat: when they have been defeated, they shall be taken into captivity as slaves; we will make their sons eunuchs and carry off their maiden daughters to Bactria; and we will give their lands to others.’ This is what they said, and the Ionian tyrants passed on the message that night, each to his compatriots. But the Ionians who received the message were stubborn and none of them would contemplate such treachery, each thinking that the Persians were making this offer to him alone. This is what happened immediately after the Persians’ arrival at Miletus. (6.6–10)
Miletus occupied the tip of a promontory on the southern side of the opening of the Latmian Gulf. The city was strongly fortified on its southern landward side with two substantial natural harbours on its western side, facing the Aegean. Lade was about 4km to the west and the Hellene fleet was well placed there to command the approaches. In spite of their recent losses in Caria, the Milesians were clearly still capable of defending their city walls and manning the second-largest element of the rebel fleet; they probably operated out of their home port, which was not large enough to accommodate the rest. The Hellenes’ naval strategy, to focus on protecting the city from seaborne attack and to keep its approaches and harbours open for the delivery of supplies and reinforcements, was sound enough. But they were presumably dependent on a steady shuttle of food and drink from the mainland, and unable to close off the 16km span of the gulf to prevent the Persian fleet occupying the beaches immediately to the south and east of the city in close contact with the besieging army. In any case, this was to be a fight to the finish that the Persians could not allow the Hellenes to win.
The ousted Hellene tyrants were not with the Persians by chance but would have been enlisted by the Persians as advisers and for use as envoys or covert negotiators in their customary strategy of combining the display and application of force with diplomacy and subversion. Reinstatement to their former positions, serving the Persians as compliant vassals, would be the tyrants’ reward. Herodotus’ use of the Greek word agnomosune, ‘obstinacy’ or ‘stubbornness’, to describe the rebels’ seemingly honourable rejection of the Persian offer can be seen as criticism of their unwillingness to bow to the inevitable and makes sense as the opinion of the ‘medizing’ Hellene who may have been his source for this story; medizing was the term used for collaboration with Persia (the Medes) and could be applied to individuals or states. On the face of it ‘disdainful’ might fit the context better than ‘stubborn’. But there is a general sense that Herodotus did not think very highly of the Ionians or their conduct of this war.
The Ionian fleet’s battle order can be taken at face value. The 600 total given for the Persian fleet is a familiar stock figure. If the fleet had been that large, comprising, as it did, contingents from the four main sources of Persian seapower, its commanders would have had little cause for concern, even when bearing in mind their defeat off Cyprus. But, perhaps, their fleet was smaller or was a mix of triremes and less potent warships, and they had not anticipated how big the rebel fleet would be. It was actually almost as large as the fleet mustered by the Hellene Alliance in 480 and consisted entirely of triremes. On land the contest had for the most part been between two distinctly different methods of war, the close-quarter, close-formation shock fighting of the heavy-armed hoplite and the more fluid, long-range fighting of the lighter-armed Barbarian missile warrior, on foot or mounted. At sea, there would be little difference between the opposing forces, both consisting of triremes and with the same repertoire of tactics. The troops on board the Barbarian ships would have been a good match for the Hellenes when it came to deck-fighting. The Cypriots were very similarly equipped, and the Phoenicians and Egyptians also wore helmets and armour; the Cilicians, on the other hand, were less heavily armed:
The Egyptians carried hollow shields with broad rims, naval pikes and great battle-axes, and most of them also had body armour and long dirks ... The Cilicians had their own type of helmet29 and their shields were not hoplite shields but made of oxhide, and they wore woollen tunics. They each carried two javelins and a short sword very similar to the Egyptian dirk. (7.89, 91)
After they had all gathered at Lade, the Ionians held meetings30 and amongst the several individuals that, I am sure, had their say at them, was Dionysius, the leader of the Phocaeans, and this is what he said: ‘Ionians, we are now on the razor’s edge. Are we to be free men or slaves, runaway slaves at that? If you are willing to face hardship and put in the effort now, you will be able to overcome your enemies and go on living as free men. But if you are feeble and undisciplined, I can hold out no hope that you will be saved from paying the Great King the price of your rebellion. So, put your trust in me and I promise you our enemies will not take us on in battle, or, if they do, that they shall be soundly beaten, if the gods treat us fairly.’ The Ionians heard Dionysius out and put their trust in him, so every day he took them out to sea, lined them up and had the oarsmen practise the diekplous manoeuvre on the other ships, and he also had the deck crews train and equip themselves for action. Then for the rest of the day he kept the ships at anchor and made the men carry on training. (6.11–12)
Dionysius was in command of only three ships, but Phocaea had been a leading maritime power amongst the cities of Ionia until around 540 when most of its population had migrated to southern Italy to escape Persian rule. Their new settlement, Elea, thrived and was the birthplace of an influential early 5th-century philosophical school, but the home city never recovered. Dionysius’ apparent reputation as an expert naval commander may have been acquired through privateering and mercenary activities in the Aegean and eastern Mediterranean, and perhaps he had distinguished himself in the Ionians’ victory off Cyprus. Herodotus pointedly contrasts his professionalism and dedication with the softness of most of the other Ionians and this episode allows him to present some of the reasons he assembles for the failure of their rebellion. Leaving aside the underlying weaknesses of the alliance and the faultlines that ran through it, and the prejudices of Herodotus and his sources, the beaches of the small island of Lade would have been very crowded and the sickness that broke out probably had more to do with living conditions than unaccustomed exertion. The Persians could afford to watch and wait:
For seven days the Ionians were obedient to Dionysius and carried out his orders.31 But they were not accustomed to such hard work and were worn out by their efforts and the heat of the sun, and this is what they began to say to each to other, ‘Which of the gods have we so offended that they force us to do this? We are out of our minds, taking leave of our senses to put our trust in this Phocaean tramp32 who is contributing just three ships! He has completely taken over and is inflicting terrible suffering on us. Many of us are sick already, and many more are likely to fall ill as well. We’ll surely be better off with any kind of suffering in place of our present hardship, even enduring the slavery that may be in store for us. Whatever form that suffering takes, it will not be as terrible as the burden that now weighs down on us. Come on, let’s stop obeying this man’s orders!’ That’s what they said and, from then on, no one obeyed Dionysius’ orders, and they pitched tents on the island as if they were soldiers and lay around in the shade, refusing to get on board their ships and do any more training.
When the Samian commanders became aware of what was happening in the Ionian ranks, they thought again about the message that Aeaces son of Syloson33 had been ordered to send to them from the Persians, calling upon them to desert the Ionian alliance. Now, having observed the total lack of discipline amongst the Ionians, they welcomed the invitation. In any case, they thought the Great King’s power was irresistible and were certain that even if they defeated the fleet currently facing them, another one five times the size of it would come along.34 So, when they saw that the Ionians were not prepared to do their duty, they had their excuse, and they could also see how they would benefit by keeping their temples and homes safe. Aeaces, from whom they received the message, was tyrant of Samos until he was deposed by Aristagoras of Miletus along with the rest of the Ionian tyrants.
When at last the Phoenicians put to sea, the Hellenes went out to meet them in line-ahead. The two sides bore down on each other and engaged, but I cannot say with any accuracy which of the Hellenes fought with gallantry in this sea-battle and which did not, because they now all blame each other. However, it is said that right at the start the Samians, having agreed terms with Aeaces, hoisted their sails,35 abandoned their positions in the line and set course for Samos, all of them except for 11 ships whose captains ignored their commanders and stayed and fought. (Afterwards the people of Samos honoured these men by setting up a column inscribed with their names and a proclamation that they had proved their gallantry, and that column is still there in the marketplace.) Seeing the ships next to them deserting, the Lesbians did the same, and so did most of the Ionians. Of those who stayed to fight, the Chians did not behave like cowards but did glorious deeds, and so had the roughest time of all. They had provided 100 ships, as already mentioned, with 40 picked men on the deck of each. When they saw the majority of their allies betraying the alliance, they were not prepared to display such cowardice. Abandoned by the rest, they fought on with the support of just a few of the allies, breaking the enemy line and taking a large number of ships, but also losing most of their own; those in the ships that survived finally made their escape and returned home.
The crews of the Chian triremes that were crippled by battle damage escaped their pursuers by making for Mycale. They beached their ships and abandoned them there and set off across the mainland on foot, and their march took them onto Ephesian soil. It was night when they reached it and the women were celebrating the Thesmophoria.36 The Ephesians had not yet heard what had happened to the Chians and were convinced that this was a robber band invading their territory and coming after their women. So, they came out in full force and slaughtered the Chians. As for Dionysius, when he saw that all was lost for the Ionians, he sailed off with the three enemy ships he had captured. But he did not immediately make for Phocaea because he knew very well that the city would be enslaved along with the rest of Ionia. Instead he sailed directly to Phoenicia, where he captured three merchant ships, and then on to Sicily with a load of booty. He made his base there and operated as a pirate, but only preying on Carthaginians and Etruscans, not on Hellenes. (6.12–17)
The Persians most likely had good intelligence of the condition and state of mind of a large proportion of the more than 70,000 Hellenes they were about to face and went into battle confident that their subversion had worked. They probably came out from the beaches on either side of Miletus in line-ahead and then formed into line abreast to bear down on Lade and simultaneously threaten the two harbours of Miletus. The Hellenes had no option but to come out and meet them as they would have been unable to mount any kind of defence with their ships beached or at anchor. Herodotus, for the first time in any of his dealings with sea-battles, provides some tactical information. He has already mentioned the training that Dionysius had given to the fleet. The Hellenes moved out in line-ahead, presumably led by Dionysius’ flagship, with the aim of using the diekplous manoeuvre. This tactic principally involved ramming. The Chians, with 40 hoplites on each of their ships, were also ready to fight in ‘the old-fashioned way’. After the Samians, Lesbians and ‘most of the Ionians’ had turned and run, Dionysius was probably left with considerably fewer than 200 ships, but it seems he was still able to put up a good fight, suggesting that the Persians even then did not outnumber the Hellenes by a large margin.
In the absence of any reference to its part in the fighting, it seems probable that the substantial Milesian fleet fought its way home to the city’s harbour when it became clear that the battle was lost. The explanation of the Chian survivors’ cruel fate may have been invented, although interruption of the Thesmophoria, from which men were strictly excluded, would have been an act of great sacrilege. Ephesus was one of Ionia’s foremost cities but did not have a fleet and is not mentioned as taking any part in the land warfare of the Ionian Revolt. The Ephesians may have been more sympathetically inclined towards Persia than the other Hellene cities of Asia, and the story told by Herodotus could have been created to cover up a shameful act of treachery. Dionysius’ retirement to, or resumption of a life of patriotic piracy ends the account of the battle of Lade on a happier note.
After defeating the Ionian fleet, the Persians were able to blockade Miletus by land and sea, and they undermined the walls using all kinds of siege machinery. And they took the city, town and acropolis, five years after Aristagoras’ rebellion and enslaved its people. This disaster came about as prophesied by the oracle at Delphi:
‘O Miletus, contriver of troubles!37
Many shall feast upon you.
You shall become a glittering gift-offering.
Your women shall wash the feet of long-haired men
And other hands shall tend our holy place at Didyma.’38
And this is indeed what happened to Miletus. Most of the men were killed by Persians, who wear their hair long, the women and children were reduced to slavery, and the holy place at Didyma, the temple and the seat of the oracle were looted and torched. I have told of the wealth of this holy place at other points in my narrative. The Milesian men who had been taken prisoner were brought to Susa and Darius the King did no more harm to them but settled them in Ampe on the Erythraean Sea39 close to where the Tigris flows into it.
After the sea-battle off Miletus, the Phoenicians reinstated Aeaces in Samos as directed by the Persians in recognition of the great and valuable service he had done them. The Samians were the only people who had rebelled against Darius who did not have their cities and temples burned down, and this was because of their desertion with their ships in the battle. Once Miletus had been dealt with, the Persians went on to take control of Caria, some cities submitting voluntarily, others being forcibly subdued. So that was the end of it. (6.18–20, 25)
But not quite ... Histiaeus, still ambitious to regain his former power, came south with his Lesbian fleet and conquered Chios, exploiting the island’s weakness after its fleet’s mauling at the battle of Lade. He then raised a larger force from Ionia and Aeolis and mounted an attack on Thasos but abandoned this when he heard that the Phoenician fleet was sailing up the Ionian coast from Miletus. He brought his fleet back to Lesbos, but food was in short supply so he took it over to the mainland to plunder the grain harvest on the plains along the River Caicus.
A Persian general called Harpagus40 happened to be in the area with a substantial force and attacked the Hellene landing party. He killed most of them but took Histiaeus alive and this is how it came about. The Hellenes fought the Persians at Malene and held out until the cavalry was sent in and charged them. This was decisive, and the Greeks turned and ran. But Histiaeus, confident that the King would not have him executed for his latest transgression, displayed his instinct for survival in this way: when a Persian seized him as he fled and was about to skewer him, he came out with a few words of Persian to let him know that he was Histiaeus the Milesian. (6.28)
So Histiaeus survived, but Harpagus and Artaphernes had no intention of allowing him to charm the Great King yet again. So, they took him back to Sardis and had him impaled and decapitated, then delivered his embalmed head to Darius. The King was not pleased and ordered them to give the head a proper burial because he still thought that Histiaeus had served him and Persia very well. Herodotus ends this episode with a dismissive ‘So that’s what became of Histiaeus.’ The final suppression of the Hellenes of the eastern Aegean took a little more time:
The Persian fleet wintered at Miletus and campaigned again the following year, easily conquering the islands lying off the western coast, Chios, Lesbos and Tenedos. When they had occupied an island the barbarians ‘netted’ the men on it. This is how it is done: each man joins hands with the next forming a chain from north shore to south and they work their way along the whole length of the island, flushing the male islanders out. The Persians also took back the Ionian cities on the mainland, though netting was not practicable there. And now the Persian commanders did not shy away from carrying out what they had threatened to do to the Ionians who had gone to war against them. They picked out the best-looking boys and made them eunuchs and transported the most beautiful young women from the coast to the King, and when they had done this they burned down the Ionians’ cities and their holy places too. And this is how Ionia came to be enslaved three times over, first by the Lydians then twice in succession by the Persians. Afterwards the Persian fleet sailed north and took back everything on the western side of the Hellespont. Everything on the eastern side was already under Persian control.
In the year that followed41 the Persians brought all hostilities against the Ionians to an end and, in fact, did some things which were very much to their benefit. Artaphernes, the governor of Sardis, summoned representatives from all the cities and, through them, required the Ionians to draw up treaties amongst themselves under which they would settle disputes through litigation rather than by rape and pillage. This is what he made them do, and he also had their land measured in parasangs (the Persian term for a distance of 30 stades42). Artaphernes set the amount of tribute to be paid by each city according to this assessment of the Ionians’ property and the amounts remained much the same in living memory;43 they were actually not much different from what they had been before. So, there was peace.
Then, the following spring, Mardonius, son of Gobryas, came down to the coast in command of a very large land army and fleet. He was a young man who had recently married the King’s daughter, Artozostre. He arrived in Cilicia at the head of this army and there went on board one of the ships and sailed with the fleet. Other commanders led the army on to the Hellespont. Sailing along the shores of Asia, Mardonius reached Ionia and there, I tell you, he did something that will come as a great surprise to Hellenes who find it impossible to believe that Otanes, one of the seven Persians who chose Darius as King, suggested that democracy might be the best form of government for Persia. Mardonius deposed all the tyrants in Ionia and introduced democracy in place of tyranny. (6.31–33, 42–43)
In fact, tyrannies were not universally replaced with democracies and, in any case, the political systems adopted did not affect the cities’ subject status. The Persians’ priority was compliance, stability and internal order at both local and regional level, and, of course, revenue. But they appear to have made genuine efforts to address grievances and frictions that had fuelled the dissatisfaction and unrest which Histiaeus and Anaxagoras had so successfully exploited. A later, 1st-century bc source, Diodorus Siculus, involves the wise Hecataeus in this episode:
Hecataeus the Milesian, who had been sent as an envoy by the Ionians, asked Artaphernes why he did not trust them. When Artaphernes replied that he feared that they would feel bitter resentment because of the pain they had suffered in defeat, Hecataeus responded, ‘Well, if ill treatment breeds bad faith, fair treatment will surely cause our cities to be well disposed toward the Persians.’ Artaphernes agreed with this and gave the cities back their laws and assessed their tributes according to their ability to pay. (Library of History 10.25.4)
This policy was in line with present-day counter-insurgency doctrine, recognizing that lasting success is achieved not by military force but through political and social measures. However, it was clearly still thought necessary to project military power beyond the western frontiers of the empire to reinforce this newly established stability.
Mardonius pressed on to the Hellespont where a massive fleet and land army were now assembled. They sailed across the Hellespont and advanced into Europe. Their destination was Eretria and Athens, or that was the declared purpose of the expedition. In fact, the Persians’ intention was to subdue as many Hellene cities as they could. This is what they did to Thasos with their fleet and the Thasians did not lift a finger to resist, and, with their army, the Persians added the Macedonians to their stock of slaves.44 All the peoples closer than Macedon were already in their power. The fleet crossed over to the mainland coast from Thasos and sailed along to Acanthus, and set out from there to round the Athos peninsula. As it was on the way round, a gale struck it from the north and it was very roughly tossed about. The ships could not ride the storm out and many of them were hurled onto the coast of Athos. It is said that 300 ships were lost and more than 20,000 men. The sea around Athos is full of man-eating fish45 and some were snatched and killed by these, some were smashed against the rocks, some died of cold and some perished because they could not swim. So that’s what happened to the fleet. As for Mardonius and his army, the Brygoi, a Thracian tribe, killed many of them in a night attack on their encampment in Macedonia and Mardonius himself was wounded. However, the Brygoi were not to escape slavery, for Mardonius did not leave their territory until he had made them Persian subjects. After subduing Macedon, he led his command back because it had been so badly battered, the land force at the hands of the Brygoi and the fleet by the ocean off Athos. His mission had been a disgraceful failure and he withdrew into Asia. (6.42–44)
If Herodotus is right about the broad scope of this mission, Mardonius had indeed fallen short in failing to drive deep into the heartland of Hellas and, specifically, to reach and punish Athens and Eretria. However, he had re-established or at least reinforced the empire’s control of Thrace and Macedonia, securing the land route for any future thrust into Europe, and the rich island of Thasos was a substantial prize. His losses at sea may be somewhat over-dramatized, and the clash with the Brygoi did not affect the successful outcome of that piece of the campaign, so the expedition had not been a total failure. Nevertheless, Darius did not put him in command of his next thrust into Europe. Still, by the middle of the following decade, Mardonius ‘had more influence with the Great King than any other Persian’ and was to be a central figure in the campaign of 480/79.
The destruction of Miletus and the inevitable collapse of the Ionian Revolt shook Hellas:
The Athenians displayed their profound grief at the fate of Miletus in many different ways, most notably when Phrynichus put on his play The Fall of Miletus,46 and the entire audience was reduced to tears. Phrynichus was fined 1,000 drachmas47 for reminding the Athenians of a disaster that was so close to home, and the play was banned. (6.21)
Through this decade, the Hellenes had continued to fight their internal wars and the Persians would have looked on with interest. For example, at Sepeia in 494, the Spartans wiped out their neighbours and old enemy, the Argives, as a serious military force for a generation and consolidated their leadership of the Hellenes of the Peloponnese. However, the deposition and exile of Demaratus, one of their two kings, and the subsequent disgrace and strange and gruesome end of Cleomenes, the other, would have been seen as encouraging evidence of instability within one of the leading nations of Hellas. Darius made Demaratus welcome at court and he became an adviser to Xerxes, his successor. In the meantime, the Athenians were constantly at war with Aegina. The Persians continued to cultivate subversive links with reactionary factions in Athens through Hippias, like Demaratus a welcome Hellene exile, and his diminishing but influential body of supporters. For their part, the Athenians had been looking east, uncomfortably aware of the threat that grew as their eastern cousins, the Ionians, were progressively subdued. As in Britain in the run-up to World War II, there was a polarizing split between the forces of appeasement, spearheaded by a reactionary rearguard, who wanted to turn the political clock back, and the forces of resistance and active opposition. The latter were reinforced by the emergence of two strong war-leaders, Miltiades and Themistocles:
Miltiades had recently returned to Athens from the Chersonese and had escaped death twice before becoming an Athenian general. First, the Phoenicians had chased him as far as Imbros, making great efforts to capture him and deliver him to the Great King, but he got away from them and reached home. He thought he was safe, but then his rivals brought him to trial on a charge of ruling as a tyrant in the Chersonese.48 He survived this as well, and afterwards he was elected general by the choice of the people. (6.103–04)
Ironically, the aristocratic Miltiades owed his many lucrative years as an autocratic colonial governor to Hippias and had served the Great King, albeit with selective loyalty, for some of that time. Themistocles had risen from a less gilded background and was to become, in all but name, supreme commander of the Hellene fleet at one of the most critical wartime moments in the history of the western world. The war with Aegina enabled him to focus on the development of Athenian seapower, which at the end of the next decade was to lie at the core of the strategy for the defence of Hellas. Herodotus introduces him only when his narrative reaches the events of the first half of 480:
There was a certain Athenian who had recently taken his place amongst the most prominent citizens. His name was Themistocles and he was called the son of Neocles. (7.143)
This is more of a put-down than a fanfare; he is more generous in his appreciation of him later in the Historia, but Thucydides supplies important detail about Themistocles’ earlier career and neatly summarizes his strategic vision:
Themistocles persuaded the Athenians to complete the fortification of Piraeus, a project he had initiated in the year he held the office of archon.49 He saw that the place was excellently situated with its three natural harbours and reckoned that it would strongly support the efforts of the Athenian people to build the power of their city, now they had become seamen. Themistocles was the first to venture to suggest that they make the sea their own, planting the seeds of empire at that very moment ... He made seapower his priority because, I think, he had noted that the Great King’s invasion force had come much closer to Athens by sea than by land.50 So, Themistocles considered Piraeus to be of much greater value than the upper city51 and he frequently gave the Athenians this advice, that if they were ever struggling to defend themselves on land, they should go down to Piraeus and their ships and then could take on the whole world. (History of the Peloponnesian War 1.93)
Persia increased the pressure on Hellas in 491. Herodotus continues:
Darius wished to find out if the Hellenes would put up a fight or surrender. So he sent heralds all over Hellas with his personal demand for offerings of earth and water. He also sent heralds to his subject cities on the coast of Asia, ordering them to build warships and horse-transports, and those cities set to work. The heralds who went to Hellas collected what the King had demanded from many of the cities of the mainland and from all the islands they visited. Aegina was one of the islands that offered earth and water to Darius and the Athenians strongly objected to this. They saw it as an act of hostility signifying their intention to side with the Persians in making war on Athens. Pleased to have this justification, the Athenians took the matter up with the Spartans and accused the Aeginetans of betraying Hellas. (6.48–49)
On the evidence of what happened at the time of Xerxes’ invasion ten years later, it is likely that most of the cities of Boeotia and Thessaly offered submission. The islands of the eastern Aegean were already under Persian control, but earth and water may have been collected from some of the Cyclades. Later in the Historia Herodotus tells the story of the Athenians’ and Spartans’ emphatic rejection of Darius the King’s command:
Xerxes sent no heralds to Athens or Sparta to demand earth and water for this reason. Ten years earlier, when Darius had sent heralds with the same purpose, the Athenians had thrown them into the Pit52 and the Spartans had thrown them down a well, telling them to get their earth and water for the Great King from there. But I cannot say what disaster the Athenians suffered for treating heralds like this. Certainly, their city and lands were laid waste, but I think that was for a different reason. (7.133)
Herodotus may be signalling a degree of scepticism here. Mistreatment of heralds was regarded as extreme sacrilege and laid the guilty open to the avenging curse of the hero Talthybius, King Agamemnon’s herald in the Trojan War. Herodotus is rather weakly arguing that, if the Athenians did suffer from a curse, it was laid on them for a different reason, perhaps their part in the destruction of the temple of Cybele in Sardis. Because of what had already passed between Athens and Persia, it could be argued that a state of war existed between them, so Darius would have had no great reason to include them in his diplomatic offensive; Marathon would give Xerxes even less reason. Retribution had to be delivered and to be seen to be delivered, but, on the other hand, it was Persian policy always to keep open the option of diplomatic resolution. However, the invitation to collect earth and water from the bottom of a well has a salty Spartan flavour to it and the sense of solidarity shared between two leading Hellene cities rings true. Whatever dealings there may have been, Herodotus does give a feel for the internal political manoeuvring of the time. A later source links Miltiades with the Athenians’ execution of the heralds. Members of the ‘war party’, including Themistocles, probably sponsored Phrynichus’ Fall of Miletus. Sparta supported Athens in the conflict with Aegina, and Corinth, another major power, also became involved. Athens, given the opportunity to exploit a planned coup on the island, took a fleet of 70 ships, 20 of them on loan from Corinth for a nominal fee, but arrived a day too late. Nonetheless, the Athenians won a sea-battle and also defeated the Aeginetans on land before losing four ships in a subsequent skirmish. This episode seems to have been inconclusive but it usefully flexed Athens’ muscles on land and sea, and affirmed the strategic stance that Miltiades and Themistocles and their supporters were promoting.
On nearly all the evidence of its campaigning over the past six decades of its existence, the Persian Empire had proved itself invincible. However, its first invasion of Europe had met with failure north of the Danube. Its second thrust to the west, the attack on Naxos in 500, had been unsuccessful and its third and most recent campaign led by Mardonius had fallen short of its objectives in mainland Hellas. The Ionian Revolt had been suppressed but operations had been stretched out over five or six years. Hellenes motivated to protect their homeland and freedoms could demonstrate that the Great King’s mighty war machine was both fallible and resistible. Some could support this belief with plausible strategic and tactical insights based on first- or close second-hand experience of the way the Barbarians waged war. They could also suggest that geography and the gods of wind and ocean would be on their side. For his part, the Great King had already established that Hellas, even mainland Hellas, would not unite against him when he launched his next attack and he could be confident that any smaller alliances that might be formed would be fragile. On the evidence of several victories won on land in the suppression of the Ionian Revolt, he could also be confident of success in any future confrontation with Hellene armies, especially as he was now able to reinforce his Asian troops with Hellene levies. Herodotus makes no comment on the apparent trust in the latter to fight kindred Hellenes with commitment and some may have been token contingents taken along as hostages, in effect, to insure against insurrection in their home cities. More value may have been attached to Hippias, now in his 80s, and presumably other Pisistratid exiles who were to sail with the invasion force to connect with the small like-minded minority that still existed in Athens and would be willing to accept Persian rule as the price of rolling back the democratic reforms of still quite recent years; they would also be restored to power as puppet rulers with Hippias, tyrant of Athens once again, as their leader, or so the old man wished. At sea, the Hellene fleets that had defeated his Phoenicians off Cyprus and posed a significant threat in the early stages of the siege of Miletus would be fighting for him or sidelined. Moreover, through the 490s and well into the 480s, even if the Hellenes of mainland Greece who had not submitted to him had combined all their fleet, it would have been only about half the size of the fleet assembled by the Ionian alliance at Lade. The Persians’ fourth campaign into Europe was to be seaborne and aimed directly at Eretria and Athens, delivering retribution for these cities’ part in the burning of Sardis, but it had the larger goal of establishing a strategic foothold in mainland Greece. The Athenians, at least, were ready.
Notes
1 This is thought to have been Hecataeus’ improved edition of the map of the world, the first known of in the western tradition, created by Anaximander, the 6th-century Milesian ‘natural philosopher’. It would have been a novel and impressive visual aid in Aristagoras’ presentations in Sparta and Athens, although it seems from an earlier comment that Herodotus himself found it unimpressive.
2 Much is made elsewhere of the difference between Ionians and Dorians; Aristagoras the Ionian is here appealing to the Dorian Lacedaemonians as Hellenes.
3 A talent was worth 6,000 drachmas and a drachma was roughly a day’s wage for a skilled worker.
4 The Great King had other palace-cities but Susa was the principal one and his principal treasury was there.
5 The Spartans had conquered the Messenians by the end of the 8th century and successfully subdued them when they rebelled around the middle of the 7th. The Third Messenian War was to come some time after these events in the shape of the Helot Revolt of 465. The Messenians could hardly be described as ‘an equal match’ historically, and either Herodotus had his facts wrong, or felt the need to show Aristagoras up.
6 ‘Guest-friendship’ (xenia) was the ancient term for the respected bond which could be established between individuals from separate nations or states and of different ethnicity.
7 The eastern side of the Aegean.
8 Herodotus’ figure of ‘90 days’, arrived at after a detailed and not always accurate break-down of the probable route into its main stages, is a reasonable estimate for the 2,500km journey from the Aegean coastline to Susa.
9 A meeting of the Assembly, at which all citizens were entitled to speak and vote.
10 This was probably true to the extent that there were influential Athenians amongst the migrants from mainland Greece that had settled in Ionia in previous centuries.
11 The number of citizens eligible to vote was nearer 20,000 at that time.
12 Otherwise unheard of.
13 Herodotus’ use of the word trieres for the Eretrians’ contingent but the generic naus (ship) for the Athenians’ may indicate that the latter comprised or included smaller warships or even transport vessels.
14 A war fought in about 700, probably over sea-trading interests. But the Eretrians may have felt some indebtedness to the Athenians for their defeat of the Chalcidians in 506.
15 A source of the legendary wealth of Lydia under the 6th-century King Croesus.
16 Cybele was the mother-goddess of non-Hellene Asia and shared attributes with the Hellene goddess Demeter.
17 One of the leading Hellene poets of his time, active from about 515 until his death in Sicily 20 years after the Persian War.
18 An important centre of trade and agriculture in the south-east corner of Caria.
19 Elsewhere termed ‘tyrants’.
20 Soli in the north-west was one of the ten or so major ‘city kingdoms’ of Cyprus.
21 Herodotus (a native of Halicarnassus in Caria) uses the word hypaspist here, its only occurrence in the Historia. It is generally translated as ‘shieldbearer’ though this man’s combat role is clearly more active. In Alexander the Great’s army hypaspist was the term for medium infantry often deployed alongside cavalry.
22 Drepanon, sometimes translated as ‘scimitar’ or ‘scythe’, and compared to a medieval falchion. The context here suggests some form of long-handled weapon which Herodotus identifies elsewhere as carried exclusively by the Carians and the neighbouring Lycians. It may have been similar to the fearsome two-handed falx, wielded by the Dacians and Thracians in their wars with Rome a few centuries later.
23 Exact location unknown.
24 Of particular interest to Herodotus as a citizen of Halicarnassus, a long-established Hellene settlement assimilated into the Persian Empire along with the surrounding Asian region of Caria; Herodotus was a Hellene but probably had Carian family connections. The family name was to live on in the Mausoleum of Halicarnassus, one of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, the tomb of Mausolus who governed Caria for the Persians in the mid 4th century.
25 Not the Pythagoras, who was from nearby Samos but spent the latter part of his life in southern Italy and died early in the 5th century.
26 The ancient sacred meeting place of the generally loose confederacy of the cities of Ionia. It was near the coast about half-way between Ephesus and Miletus.
27 The Aeolian cities on the mainland were already back under Persian control.
28 The Persians probably could have taken Miletus without defeating the Ionians at sea, but it would have been more difficult and taken longer.
29 Either this type of helmet was well enough known not to require description, or Herodotus did not know how it differed from other types.
30 Herodotus uses the word agora here, literally ‘marketplace’ as scorned by Cyrus as ‘a place set aside (by Hellenes) in the middle of their city in which they gather together, swear false oaths and swindle each other’ (1.153). There is a suggestion here that the Ionians did not have a proper command structure or procedures.
31 Dionysius most probably carried out his training programme before the enemy arrived off Miletus because the manoeuvring involved would have invited an attack.
32 The word alazon may also be translated as ‘charlatan’ in later texts, but ‘tramp’ or ‘vagrant’ fits perceptions of Dionysius as a stateless buccaneer.
33 The ousted tyrant of Samos, acting as an intermediary for the Persians.
34 The multiple is excessive, but the Persian navy certainly had the resources to regroup and return in greater force, if defeated.
35 Battles were fought under oar power alone for greater manoeuvrability. There is evidence that the mainsails and masts were left on shore before battle, so it may have been only the smaller foresails that were hoisted when running away.
36 This was an annual festival honouring the fertility goddess Demeter; it was held all over the Hellene world in early autumn.
37 The powerful priesthood of Delphi was clearly advising against rebellion at the time Aristagoras was in the Peloponnese seeking support for it.
38 An important shrine of Apollo about 10km to the south of Miletus.
39 The Red Sea.
40 Not related to Cyrus’ formidable lieutenant, a Mede of the same name.
41 493/2.
42 The stade was a measure of distance representing the length of a running track (stadion), a measurement that was not precisely standardized; 185m is a fair equivalent.
43 By the middle of the century, with Persia’s grip on the western edge of the empire loosened, tribute payments were no longer flowing east but to Athens.
44 Macedonia had submitted earth and water two decades earlier but the relationship clearly required reinforcement.
45 Shark attacks are documented in other ancient sources and still occur in the Mediterranean; drowning would have been the main cause of death, however.
46 This may have been the first tragedy to address a historical rather than mythical or legendary event.
47 As one drachma was a skilled worker’s daily wage, this was a very heavy fine.
48 Implying that he could have been sentenced to death if found guilty of this emotively defined ‘crime’.
49 In 493/2 the archon was the civilian head-of-state selected to serve for one year with eight other archons. The nine archons shared various duties of government, administrative, military and religious. Miltiades had held this position in 524/3.
50 In 490 in the Marathon campaign.
51 The Acropolis and the inland conurbation that surrounded it.
52 A ravine into which condemned criminals were thrown.