[1] So that was how Aristagoras, the initiator of the Ionian rebellion, died. Meanwhile, however, Histiaeus, the tyrant of Miletus, had been released by Darius and arrived in Sardis from Susa. Once he was there, Artaphrenes, the governor of Sardis, asked him what, in his opinion, had caused the Ionians to revolt. Histiaeus feigned complete ignorance of the situation, saying that he had no idea and expressing surprise at the turn of events. But Artaphrenes realized that he was putting on a false front—in fact, he knew the truth about the revolt—so he said, ‘I’ll tell you what actually happened in this business, Histiaeus: it was you who stitched the shoe, while Aristagoras merely put it on.’
[2] This comment about the revolt made Histiaeus afraid of what Artaphrenes knew, so the very next night he slipped away to the coast. He had tricked King Darius with the promise that he would conquer Sardo, the largest island in the world, when what he intended to do was try to gain the leadership of the war against Darius. He crossed over to Chios, but was imprisoned by the Chians on suspicion of being up to no good and of working for Darius against them. When they found out the whole story, however, and realized that he was hostile to Darius, they set him free.
[3] Histiaeus was next asked by the Ionians why he had been so anxious to encourage Aristagoras to revolt from the king—and thus to cause so much trouble for Ionia. He did not give them the real reason, however: he told them that King Darius had been planning to relocate the Phoenicians in Ionia, and to move the Ionians to Phoenicia, and that was why he had sent the message to Aristagoras. He was trying to alarm the Ionians, even though Darius had not been planning anything of the kind.
[4] Later, Histiaeus used a man called Hermippus, from Atarneus, to take a letter to Sardis; there were Persians there with whom Histiaeus had already spoken about rebellion against Darius. But Hermippus did not deliver the letter to its addressees; instead he went and put it in Artaphrenes’ hands. When Artaphrenes found out what was going on, he told Hermippus to take Histiaeus’ letter and give it to the people to whom he was supposed to deliver it, but then to give him the reply they sent back to Histiaeus. With the discovery of this plot Artaphrenes put to death a large number of Persians.
[5] So Sardis was in turmoil, and Histiaeus’ plan came to nothing. Next, at Histiaeus’ own request, the Chians tried to engineer his return to Miletus; the Milesians, however, were glad to have got rid of Aristagoras, and, now that they had tasted independence, they were in no great hurry to welcome another tyrant into their land. In fact, when Histiaeus tried to bring about his restoration by force and under cover of darkness, he was wounded in the thigh by one of the Milesians. Banished from his native city, he returned to Chios. He tried to persuade the Chians to give him a fleet, but they refused, so he went over to Mytilene, where he persuaded the Lesbians to give him some ships. They manned eight triremes and sailed with Histiaeus to Byzantium, where they set up a base and proceeded to seize all ships sailing out of the Euxine Sea, unless the crews promised to recognize Histiaeus as their leader.
[6] While Histiaeus and the Mytileneans were occupied with this, Miletus was in imminent danger of being attacked in strength by both land and sea. The Persian military commanders had combined their forces into a single army, and were marching against Miletus, which they considered the most important of the Ionian states. As for their navy, the Phoenicians formed the most willing contingent, and they were supported by the Cyprians (who had recently been conquered), the Cilicians, and the Egyptians.
[7] When the Ionians learnt of this expedition against Miletus and the rest of Ionia, they sent delegations to the Panionium. When they got there, the matter was debated and the Ionians concluded that they should not raise a land army to oppose the Persians; instead they decided that while the Milesians protected their walls by themselves, every available Ionian ship should be manned, and that this navy should then assemble at the earliest possible opportunity at Lade (a small island off the city of Miletus) and engage the enemy at sea in defence of Miletus.
[8] Later, then, the Ionians came to Lade with their ships manned; they received Aeolian support too, in the form of a contingent from Lesbos. They arranged themselves as follows. The Milesians alone formed the eastern wing, with their 80 ships; next to them came the Prieneans with 12 ships and the contingent from Myous, which consisted of 3 ships; next to the Myesians were the men of Teos with 17 ships, and then the Chians with 100; alongside them were positioned the Erythraeans and Phocaeans, with their squadrons of 8 and 3 ships respectively; and next to the Phocaeans were 70 ships from Lesbos. Finally, the western wing was formed of the Samians, with 60 ships. The whole fleet amounted to a force of 353 triremes.
[9] So this was the Ionian fleet, but there were six hundred ships in all on the foreigners’ side, which in due course reached Miletus, as did the whole of their land army as well. At that point, the Persian commanders found out how many ships the Ionians had and they were worried at the prospect of failing to defeat them, because without control of the sea they would be unable to take Miletus and they would also probably be punished by Darius. Bearing all this in mind, they invited to a conference the Ionian tyrants who had taken refuge with the Persians after Aristagoras of Miletus had deposed them, and who had in fact joined the Persian expedition against Miletus. So they convened any of these tyrants who were at hand and said, ‘Men of Ionia, now is the time for each of you to show himself to be a benefactor of the king’s house, by trying to detach his fellow citizens from the general Ionian alliance. Put it to them that, if they comply, we will not punish them for their rebellion, their sanctuaries and private property will be spared the torch, and their lives will be no harder than they were before. However, if they refuse to comply and insist on fighting, you can threaten them with the dire consequences which will certainly be their lot. Defeat in battle will be followed by enslavement, and we will castrate their sons for eunuchs, send their daughters to serve as slaves in Bactra, and give their land to others.’
[10] That is what the Persians said. One by one, the Ionian tyrants used the cover of darkness to get the message to their fellow citizens. But the Ionian recipients of these messages (each group of whom supposed that they were the only ones to be approached by the Persians) remained committed to their chosen course and refused to countenance treachery. These events took place immediately after the arrival of the Persians at Miletus.
[11] Later, when the Ionians were assembled at Lade, they held public meetings. They were addressed on various occasions by various speakers, but in particular the Phocaean commander Dionysius spoke as follows: ‘Men of Ionia, our affairs are balanced on a razor’s edge. We can remain free or we can become slaves—and runaway slaves at that. If you are prepared to accept hardship, then in the short term there’ll be work for you to do, but you will defeat the enemy and be free; if, on the other hand, you choose softness and lack of discipline, I am quite sure that you’ll be punished for rebelling against the king. No, you must do as I suggest. Put yourselves into my hands, and I can assure you that, if the gods are impartial, the enemy will either not engage us or, if they do, they will suffer a severe defeat.’
[12] Dionysius’ speech persuaded the Ionians to entrust their future to him. Each time he took the ships out in a column formation, he had the rowers practise the diecplous, with the marines armed, and then for the rest of the day he would keep the fleet at anchor. He made the Ionians work all day long. For seven days they were obedient and did as they were told, but they were unused to this kind of hard work, and the hardship and heat exhausted them. So then they said to one another, ‘Why do we have to put up with this? Have we offended one of the gods? We must have been crazy, out of our minds, to have put ourselves in the hands of a Phocaean windbag, with only three ships. Now that he has taken over, he is inflicting intolerable hardships on us. Many of us have already become ill, and it looks as though more are about to. Anything in the world is better than this misery, even so-called slavery in the future, since it’s slavery we’re enduring at the moment. So come on: let’s stop obeying him from now on.’
This line of thought immediately made them ungovernable. They stayed on the island as if they were a land army; they pitched tents and kept to the shade, and refused to board their ships or practise their manoeuvres.
[13] The Samian commanders found out what the Ionians were doing, and it was just at this point that a message came from Aeaces the son of Syloson—the same message he had been sending earlier, in obedience to the Persians, asking them to leave the Ionian alliance. This time the Samians gave the request a hearing, not only because they could see the degree to which discipline had broken down in the Ionian camp, but also because they thought it would be impossible to defeat the Persian king with all the resources at his command; they were convinced that even if they defeated his current fleet, he would get another one, five times as big. The Ionians’ evasion of duty gave them an immediate excuse, then; they regarded it as a good opportunity to ensure the survival of their sanctuaries and their private property. Aeaces, the person from whom they received the messages, was the son of Syloson and grandson of Aeaces; he had been the tyrant of Samos until he had been deposed by Aristagoras of Miletus along with all the other Ionian tyrants.
[14] When the Phoenician fleet set sail against them, the Ionians reacted by launching their ships as well, formed into a column. The two fleets drew near each other and battle was joined, but I cannot say for sure what happened next—which of the Ionians proved brave or cowardly in this battle—because everyone blames everyone else. The Samians are said to have hoisted their sails, deserted their post, and sailed back to Samos (which was what they had contracted with Aeaces to do)—all except for eleven ships, whose captains refused to obey the Samian commanders, and stayed to join the battle. For this action the Samian authorities later granted them the privilege of having their names inscribed, with their fathers’ names, on a column (which stands in the town square) as men of honour. But when the Lesbians saw the Samian contingent next to them turning tail and fleeing, they copied them, and under these circumstances most of the Ionians did the same thing.
[15] Of those who stayed and fought, the Chians came off worst, because of the conspicuous valour of their actions and because they refused to fight below their best. Their contingent consisted, as reported earlier, of a hundred ships, and on each ship there were forty men, specially picked from the citizen body, serving as marines. Seeing the treachery of their allies all around them, they resolved not to sink to their level of worthless cowardice. With hardly any support they engaged the enemy by means of the diecplous, and kept on fighting until, although they had captured large numbers of enemy ships, they had lost most of their own. Then the remaining Chian ships withdrew and headed for home.
[16] With the enemy in pursuit, all the disabled Chian ships made for the safety of Mycale, where they beached their ships and left them, and set out by foot across the mainland. Their journey brought them in due course to Ephesian territory. It was dark when they arrived there, and the local women were celebrating the Thesmophoria. The men of Ephesus had no warning of the Chians’ situation; all they saw was that an armed band had invaded their territory. Under these circumstances they were absolutely sure that the Chians were bandits who had come to carry off their women, so they came out in full strength to protect their women and proceeded to kill the Chians. That was the misfortune the Chians encountered.
[17] When Dionysius of Phocaea saw that the Ionian cause was lost, he sailed away from the area, with the three enemy ships he had captured. He did not make for Phocaea, however, because he was well aware that it would be enslaved along with the rest of Ionia. Instead he headed straight for Phoenicia, just as he was, where he made himself rich by sinking merchant ships. Then he went to Sicily and set himself up as a pirate with his base there; he used to attack Carthaginian and Tyrrhenian ships, but left Greek shipping alone.
[18] After their naval victory over the Ionians, the Persians blockaded Miletus by land and sea. They used all kinds of strategems, such as undermining the walls, until the city fell into their hands, acropolis and all, in the sixth year after Aristagoras’ revolt. They reduced the city to slavery, and so events confirmed a prediction the oracle had made about Miletus.
[19] What happened was that the Argives once consulted the oracle in Delphi about the safety of their city. They received a shared response, some of which was relevant to the Argives themselves, but there was also an appendix with a prediction about Miletus. I will record the lines that referred to the Argives later, when I come to that part of my account. In the mean time, the statement the oracle made about the Milesians, even though they were not there, was as follows:
And listen, Miletus, perpetrator of evil deeds: that is when
Many will feed off you and take you as their gleaming prize.
Your wives will wash the feet of a host of long-haired men,
And others will have charge of my temple at Didyma.
This is the fate that overtook Miletus on the occasion in question. Most of the male population was killed by the Persians (who did have long hair), their women and children were reduced to slavery, and the shrine at Didyma—both the temple and the oracle—was plundered and burnt. Elsewhere in this account I have often mentioned the valuables that were to be found in this sanctuary.
[20] Those Milesians who remained alive were taken to Susa. King Darius did them no further harm, except to relocate them on the Red Sea, in the town of Ampe (which is on the mouth of the Tigris River, where it issues into the sea). As for Milesian territory, the Persians kept for themselves the city, the land immediately around the city, and the plain, but gave the hill country to Carians from the town of Pedasa.
[21] On the occasion of these misfortunes, inflicted on the Milesians by the Persians, the people of Sybaris, who had been robbed of their city and were living in Laus and Scidrus, failed to repay a debt. The point is that when Sybaris was captured by the Crotonians, the whole Milesian population, old and young alike, shaved their heads and signalled their deep grief, because there are no known states which have closer ties than Miletus and Sybaris. Even the Athenians behaved better than the Sybarites. They found many ways to express their sorrow at the fall of Miletus, and in particular, when Phrynichus composed and produced a play called The Fall of Miletus, the audience burst into tears and fined him a thousand drachmas for reminding them of a disaster that was so close to home; future productions of the play were also banned.
[22] So Miletus was left empty of Milesians. But there were some Samians—the wealthy ones—who found their commanders’ behaviour vis-à-vis the Persians highly unsatisfactory. They talked things over straight after the battle and decided to sail away on a colonizing expedition before the tyrant Aeaces reached their country, without waiting to become the slaves of the Persians and Aeaces. The people of Zancle in Sicily had coincidentally sent a message to Ionia inviting the Ionians to Fair Cape, since they wanted to found an Ionian settlement there. Fair Cape is the part of Sicily which faces Tyrrhenia and was inhabited by Sicelians. The Samians were the only Ionians to take up the invitation and set out, and they were joined by refugee Milesians.
[23] The outcome of their journey was as follows. On their way to Sicily, the Samians reached the Western Locrians; meanwhile, the Zancleans, under their king (whose name was Scythes), were besieging a Sicelian settlement which they wanted to take over. Anaxilaus, the tyrant of Rhegium, found out what was going on. Now, at that point of time he was on bad terms with the Zancleans, so he met with the Samians and persuaded them to ignore Fair Cape, their destination, and take control of Zancle, which was undefended. The Samians agreed to the plan and took Zancle.
When the Zancleans discovered that their town had been captured, they set out to its aid, and they called on Hippocrates, the tyrant of Gela, to support them, on the grounds that he was their ally. But when Hippocrates arrived with his army to help them, he threw Scythes, the ruler of Zancle, into chains for having lost his town, treated Scythes’ brother Pythogenes in the same way, and sent them off to the town of Inyx. Then, after consulting the Samians, he exchanged oaths of friendship with them, and so his betrayal of the rest of the Zancleans was complete. The price the Samians agreed to give him was that he should have all the movable property, half the slaves in the town, and all the slaves from the farms. He took it upon himself to cast most of the inhabitants of Zancle into chains and keep them in a state of slavery, but he handed the three hundred leading citizens over to the Samians, for them to murder. But the Samians did no such thing.
[24] Scythes, the king of the Zancleans, escaped from Inyx to Himera, and from there he made his way to Asia and travelled inland to King Darius. In Darius’ view, Scythes was the most honest man who had ever come to him from Greece, since although he returned with Darius’ permission to Sicily, he came back to the king again, and eventually died in Persia a very wealthy man, when he was well on in years. So the Samians escaped Persian rule and effortlessly acquired the wonderful town of Zancle.
[25] After the battle for Miletus the Persians got the Phoenicians to restore Aeaces the son of Syloson to Samos in gratitude for the very valuable and important service he had done them. Because they had withdrawn their ships from the battle, the Samians were the only ones out of all those involved in the rebellion against Darius whose city and sanctuaries were not burnt down. Straight after the fall of Miletus, the Persians occupied Caria too, where some of the communities submitted of their own accord, and others had to be reduced by force.
[26] So much for these events. Off Byzantium, Histiaeus of Miletus was continuing to intercept Ionian merchant ships as they sailed out of the Euxine Sea. While he was there, though, he received a report about what had happened to Miletus, so he left Bisaltes of Abydus, the son of Apollophanes, in charge of matters in the Hellespont and sailed off to Chios with a force of Lesbians. On Chios, a garrison of islanders at a place called Coela refused to let him pass; battle was joined and a great many of the Chians died. Then, with the help of his Lesbians, he gained control of the rest of the island, which was, after all, weakened as a result of the sea battle. He made Polichne his headquarters on Chios.
[27] There are invariably warning signs given when disaster is going to overwhelm a community or a race; the Chians, for instance, had received extensive indications in advance of these events. In the first place, out of a chorus of one hundred young men they had sent to Delphi, only two returned home, while an outbreak of illness carried off the other ninety-eight. In the second place, at much the same time, shortly before the sea battle, a roof collapsed on a group of children learning their letters, and out of a hundred and twenty children only one survived. After these advance warnings, sent by the god, the battle brought the town to its knees, and then the sea battle was followed by Histiaeus and his Lesbians. In their weakened state, it was no problem for him to conquer the island.
[28] Histiaeus used Chios as his base to mount a campaign against Thasos with a large force of Ionians and Aeolians. But while his blockade of Thasos was in progress, a message reached him that the Phoenicians were sailing out of Miletus against the rest of Ionia. When he heard this news, he left Thasos unsacked and set off in a hurry for Lesbos, taking his whole force with him. His army became very short of food on Lesbos, so he left there and crossed over to the mainland, with the intention of harvesting the crops from Atarneus and from the plain of the Caïcus River in Mysia. However, a Persian, Harpagus, happened to be in that part of the country, with a sizeable army under his command. He engaged Histiaeus just as he disembarked, captured him alive, and wiped out most of his troops.
[29] This is how Histiaeus was captured. The battle between the Greeks and the Persians at Malene, which is in Atarneus, went on for a long time, until the Persian cavalry, which had been held in reserve, launched an attack on the Greeks and so won victory. The Greek forces were routed. Histiaeus thought that the offence he had committed would not lead Darius to put him to death, so he found a way of hanging on to his life. As he was running away from the battlefield, a Persian soldier caught up with him and was just about to stab him to death when Histiaeus spoke in Persian to him and let him know that he was Histiaeus of Miletus.
[30] It is my opinion that if after his capture he had been taken to King Darius, he would have come to no harm: the king would have pardoned him. But that was exactly why Artaphrenes the governor of Sardis and Harpagus, Histiaeus’ captor, had Histiaeus brought to Sardis and then impaled his body on a stake right there in the city, and sent his embalmed head to King Darius in Susa. They did this because they wanted to make sure that he did not survive and become influential with the king again. When Darius found out what they had done, he castigated them for not bringing Histiaeus alive to him; he ordered them to wash Histiaeus’ head, dress it appropriately, and bury it with the honour due to such a major benefactor of himself and Persia. So that is what happened to Histiaeus.
[31] The Persian fleet wintered at Miletus and then put to sea again the following year. The islands near the mainland—Chios, Lesbos, and Tenedos—were easily subdued. Whenever the Persians took one of the islands, they ‘trawled’ for the inhabitants. ‘Trawling’ involves forming a chain of men with linked arms across the island from the northern coast to the southern coast, who then traverse the whole length of the island hunting people down. They also captured the Ionian settlements on the mainland just as easily; trawling for the inhabitants was not feasible, however, so that manoeuvre was not carried out.
[32] At this point the Persian commanders did indeed carry out the actions they had threatened the Ionians with when the Ionians had pitched camp opposite them. That is, when they had conquered the settlements, they picked the best-looking boys and castrated them, cutting off their testicles and turning them into eunuchs; they also took the most attractive girls and sent them to the king as slaves. In addition, they burnt the settlements, sanctuaries and all. And so the Ionians came to be enslaved for the third time—first by the Lydians, then twice in succession by the Persians.
[33] The Persian fleet then left Ionia and conquered the whole region to the north of the Hellespont; the mainland area to the south of the Hellespont had already been conquered by the Persians themselves. The places on the Hellespont on the European side are the Chersonese (which contains a great many towns), Perinthus (and the other strongholds on the coast of Thrace), Selymbria, and Byzantium. The people of Byzantium and the Chalcedonians who live opposite Byzantium did not wait for the Phoenician fleet to arrive, but abandoned their homeland and migrated further along the coast of the Euxine Sea, where they settled in Mesambria. Once the Phoenicians had burnt all these places to the ground, they turned towards Proconnesus and Artaces, which they also put to the torch. Then they sailed back to the Chersonese to eradicate any last settlements they had not destroyed on their previous visit. They left Cyzicus completely alone, because the place was already subject to the king, and had been before the Phoenician fleet’s campaign, ever since they entered into a treaty with the governor of Dascylium, Oebares the son of Megabazus. But all the other towns and cities in the Chersonese, except Cardia, were subdued by the Phoenicians.
[34] Until then Miltiades the son of Cimon and grandson of Stesagoras had been the ruler of these communities. It was Miltiades the son of Cypselus who acquired this overlordship, and this is how it happened. A Thracian tribe called the Doloncians were in control of this Chersonese. A war with the Apsinthians was not going at all well for these Doloncians, and they sent their kings to Delphi to ask about the war. The Pythia’s reply was that they should invite over to their land the first person to extend them hospitality after they had left the shrine, and make him their Founder. The Doloncians took the Sacred Way through Phocis and Boeotia, but no one offered them hospitality, so they turned off towards Athens.
[35] Athens at that time was an autocracy, under Pisistratus, but Miltiades the son of Cypselus was a man of influence, at any rate. His household was wealthy enough to maintain a four-horse chariot and he traced his ancestry back to Aeacus and Aegina, although since then his family had become Athenian—the first Athenian of the house being Philaeus the son of Ajax. Now, Miltiades was sitting on the porch of his house, and when he saw the Doloncians approaching, wearing non-Athenian clothing and carrying spears, he called them over. When they came near he offered them a place to rest and hospitality. They accepted the invitation, and afterwards they told him all about the oracle, and asked whether he would comply with Apollo’s plan. Miltiades found their suggestion immediately appealing, because he was chafing under Pisistratus’ rule and wanted to get out from under it. He lost no time in setting out for Delphi to ask the oracle whether he should go along with the Doloncians’ request.
[36] The Pythia told him too to go ahead, and so Miltiades the son of Cypselus (who was an Olympic victor from an earlier games in the four-horse-chariot race) recruited from the Athenian populace everyone who wanted to join the expedition, set sail with the Doloncians, and took control of their country. The Doloncians who had invited him made him tyrant of the place. The first thing he did was build a defensive wall across the isthmus of the Chersonese from Cardia to Pactya, to stop the Apsinthians’ damaging incursions. This isthmus is thirty-six stades wide, but beyond the isthmus the total length of the Chersonese is 420 stades.
[37] Next, after building a wall across the neck of the Chersonese and so keeping the Apsinthians at bay, Miltiades turned his attention elsewhere. He started by making war on the people of Lampsacus, but they ambushed him and took him prisoner. However, Croesus of Lydia knew about Miltiades, and when he found out what had happened, he ordered the Lampsacenes to let Miltiades go, or else, he said, he would wipe them out ‘as if they were a pine-tree’. The Lampsacenes came up with various interpretations of this threat of Croesus’, but at last one of their older citizens got the point and told them that the pine was the only tree which produced no shoots after it had been cut down, so that it was utterly destroyed, with no hope of regeneration. Afraid of what Croesus would do, then, the Lampsacenes freed Miltiades and let him go.
[38] So thanks to Croesus Miltiades escaped. He was killed later, however, and he died without an heir, so his kingdom and his property passed to Stesagoras the son of Cimon, who was his half-brother on his mother’s side. Since Miltiades’ death, the people of the Chersonese have offered him the sacrifices traditional for a founder, and have instituted in his honour games involving both chariot-racing and athletic competitions. No one from Lampsacus is allowed to take part in these games. Stesagoras too, as it happened, died during the war with Lampsacus, and he left no heir. He died from a blow to the head which was delivered, while he was in the town hall, by a man with a battleaxe; the man was pretending to be a deserter, but was really an enemy nursing a grudge.
[39] After Stesagoras had died in this way, power in the Chersonese passed into the hands of his brother Miltiades the son of Cimon. He was sent to the Chersonese in a trireme by the Pisistratidae, who had treated him well in Athens too, as if they had no knowledge of the death of his father—I will explain what actually happened elsewhere in my account. When Miltiades arrived in the Chersonese he stayed at home, ostensibly as a way of honouring his brother Stesagoras. Once the people of the Chersonese found out what he was doing, the chief men from all over the region convened from their various towns and came together to join him in mourning—whereupon he imprisoned the whole lot of them. Miltiades maintained power in the Chersonese with the help of a force of five hundred mercenaries he kept, and he married Hegesipyle, the daughter of the Thracian king Olorus.
[40] Now, Miltiades the son of Cimon had not been in the Chersonese long when he was overtaken by events that were even worse than what had happened before. The point is that two years before the events we are talking about he had fled the country in the face of the Scythians. The nomadic Scythians had been chafing under King Darius, so they banded together and came as far as the Chersonese. Miltiades did not wait for them to invade, but fled the country, and it was only when the Scythians left that the Doloncians brought him back again. Anyway, all that took place two years before the events engaging him at the time in question.
[41] So Miltiades now heard that the Phoenicians had reached Tenedos. He manned five triremes, put all his property on board, and set sail for Athens. Starting from Cardia, his course took him through the Black Gulf, and he was just about to leave the Chersonese behind when the Phoenician fleet attacked. Miltiades himself managed to escape to Imbros with four of his ships, but the fifth ship was captured by the Phoenicians during the chase. It so happened that this ship was under the command of Metiochus, who was Miltiades’ eldest son (and whose mother was not the daughter of Olorus of Thrace, but another woman). So Metiochus fell into the Phoenicians’ hands along with his ship. When they found out that he was Miltiades’ son, they took him up to the king at Susa. They were sure that they would get a great deal of substantial gratitude, since it had, after all, been Miltiades who had advised the Ionians to fall in with the Scythians’ request that they should dismantle the pontoon bridge and sail back home. But when the Phoenicians arrived with Miltiades’ son Metiochus, so far from doing him harm, Darius heaped him with benefits. He gave him a house, property, and a Persian wife. This Persian wife bore him children who are regarded as Persians. Meanwhile, Miltiades left Imbros and reached Athens.
[42] That year, the Persians initiated no further hostilities against the Ionians other than what has already been mentioned. In fact, there were some developments that year which were extremely beneficial for the Ionians. Artaphrenes, the governor of Sardis, sent for representatives from the states and forced the Ionians to negotiate agreements with one another whereby they would submit their disputes to arbitration instead of raiding and plundering one another. As well as forcing them to do this, he also found the area of their territories in parasangs (a parasang is what the Persians call thirty stades), and then assigned each of them their tribute in accordance with the area of their territory. And Artaphrenes’ assessment of how much tribute each region was to pay remained in force from then on, right up to my day. In fact, however, Artaphrenes’ assessment was not hugely different from the previous assessment.
[43] These, then, were some peaceful measures the Persians took. In the spring of the following year, when Darius had dismissed all his other commanders, Mardonius the son of Gobryas (a young man who had recently married Darius’ daughter Artozostra) came down to the coast at the head of a very large combined land and sea force. When Mardonius and his troops reached Cilicia, he put various people in charge of the army and left them to make their way to the Hellespont, while he set off by sea with the fleet. On his way past Asia, he came to Ionia, and at this point I have something to report which those Greeks who do not believe that Otanes recommended to the seven Persian conspirators that Persia should become a democracy will find very hard to believe—that Mardonius deposed all the Ionian tyrants and instituted democracy in the cities of Ionia. Afterwards, he pressed on towards the Hellespont. Once a vast number of ships and a huge land army had congregated there, the Persians crossed the Hellespont by ship and began to march through Europe, making for Eretria and Athens.
[44] These places were the ostensible targets of the expedition, but in fact the Persians intended to conquer as many Greek towns and cities as they could. First they used the fleet to subdue the Thasians, who did not even raise a hand against them, and then they used the land army to add the Macedonians to the body of slaves they already had in the area—they already dominated all the tribes closer than the Macedonians.
The fleet crossed over from Thasos to the mainland, where it hugged the coast and sailed up to Acanthus. From Acanthus they set out to round the headland at Athos, but they were caught there in a northerly gale against which it proved impossible to make headway. The storm wrought havoc with them and wrecked a large number of ships on Athos. It is said that about three hundred ships were destroyed, and over twenty thousand men. The men died in various ways: some were seized by the sharks that infest the sea around Mount Athos, others were dashed on to the rocks, others drowned because they did not know how to swim, and others died of cold. So that is what happened to the fleet.
[45] Meanwhile, on land, a Thracian tribe called the Brygi launched a night attack on Mardonius and the army while they were encamped in Macedonia. They succeeded in killing large numbers of the Persians, and wounded Mardonius himself. Nevertheless, even the Brygi did not manage to avoid being enslaved by the Persians, because Mardonius refused to leave those parts until he had conquered them. However, once they had submitted, he pulled the army back, because of his disastrous encounter on land with the Brygi, and the catastrophe at sea off Athos. And so this force returned to Asia after its inglorious campaign.
[46] In the following year Darius started by dealing with the Thasians, because their neighbours had falsely reported that they were planning to revolt. He ordered them, through his envoys, to demolish their defensive walls and to bring their fleet to Abdera. He did this because the Thasians were using their money—and their revenue was considerable—to build longships and strengthen their walls, on the grounds that they had already been besieged by Histiaeus of Miletus. Their revenue came from the mainland and their mines. From the gold-mines at Scapte Hyle they usually gained an income of eighty talents, and although the gold-mines on Thasos itself contributed less than that, it was so much that the usual annual income from the mainland and the mines gained by the Thasians (who paid no taxes on their crops) was two hundred talents, and three hundred at its peak.
[47] I myself have seen these mines. The most remarkable ones, by a long way, were those discovered by the Phoenicians who came with Thasus and colonized the island, which is now named after this Phoenician, Thasos. These Phoenician mines on Thasos are situated between the places called Aenyra and Coenyra, facing Samothrace; a large hill there was completely excavated in the search for gold. So much for this subject.
[48] Anyway, the Thasians obeyed the king’s command, demolished their walls, and brought their whole fleet to Abdera. Darius’ next step was to try to find out whether the Greeks intended to resist or surrender. Accordingly, he sent heralds here and there throughout Greece, with orders to demand earth and water for the king. As well as sending these heralds to Greece, he also sent others to the coastal states which were already his tributaries, to transmit his instructions to arrange for the building of longships and of transport ships for horses.
[49] So the tribute-paying states began this construction work. Meanwhile, many of the mainland towns and cities did give the Persian heralds who went to Greece what the king was demanding, and so did all the islanders who received the demand. Among the islanders who gave earth and water to Darius were the Aeginetans. This provoked an immediate reaction from the Athenians, who accused the Aeginetans of having Athens in mind when they gave earth and water to Darius; they did so, the Athenians assumed, in order to accompany the Persians when they came to attack Athens. The Athenians made the most of this plausible pretext; they sent a delegation to Sparta and formally accused the Aeginetans of betraying Greece by their actions.
[50] In view of this charge, the Spartan king Cleomenes the son of Anaxandridas sailed across to Aegina with the intention of arresting the ringleaders. But his attempt to make the arrests met with opposition from a number of Aeginetans, especially Crius the son of Polycritus, who threatened Cleomenes with retaliation if he tried to remove anyone from Aegina, on the grounds that he was not acting with the permission of the Spartan authorities, but had been bribed by the Athenians; otherwise, Crius said, Cleomenes would have brought the other king with him to carry out the arrests. It was in fact a letter from Demaratus that put Crius up to making these allegations. So Cleomenes was sent packing from Aegina, but before he went he asked Crius what his name was. Crius told him the truth and Cleomenes replied, ‘Well then, Crius, you had better have your horns coated with bronze, because a great deal of trouble is coming your way.’
[51] Meanwhile in Sparta Demaratus the son of Ariston was blackening Cleomenes’ name. Demaratus was also a king of Sparta, but was from the lesser house. In fact, since both families share a common ancestry, the only respect in which this house is inferior is in order of birth, so that the house of Eurysthenes has a touch more honour because of that.
[52] There is no authority in poetry for this, but the Lacedaemonians claim that Aristodamus (who was the son of Aristomachus, grandson of Cleodaeus, and great-grandson of Hyllus) brought them to the land they currently occupy while he was king—that is, they deny that it was Aristodamus’ sons who did so. Not long afterwards, they continue, Aristodamus’ wife (whose name was Argeia, the daughter of Autesion, who was the son of Tisamenus, grandson of Thersander and great-grandson of Polynices) gave birth to twins, and Aristodamus lived to see his children, but then grew ill and died. The Lacedaemonians of the time decreed that the kingdom should pass, as was traditional, to the elder of the two boys, but they did not know which of them to choose, because they were identical twins, with no difference between them. Since they were unable to decide, they consulted the boys’ mother (or perhaps they had consulted her at an earlier stage), but she claimed to be just as incapable of telling which was older and which was younger. Despite saying this, she knew perfectly well, but she wanted to find a way for both of them to become kings. So the Lacedaemonians were stuck, and under these circumstances they sent emissaries to Delphi to ask the oracle how to resolve the situation. The Pythia told them to treat both sons as kings, but to honour the elder one more. This reply of the Pythia’s did not make things easier for the Lacedaemonians, who still did not know how to tell which of the boys was the elder.
At this juncture, so the story goes, a Messenian called Panites came forward with an idea. He suggested that the Lacedaemonians should watch the mother and see which of the two children she washed first and fed first. If it turned out that she always followed the same routine, they would have all the information they needed to resolve their difficulty; however, if she varied her routine and alternated, it would be clear that she knew just as little as them, and they would have to find some other approach. So the Spartiates put the Messenian’s plan into effect and watched the mother of Aristodamus’ sons. She had no idea why she was being watched, and they noticed that she always picked the children up in the same way, giving preference to one of them when it came to washing and feeding them. The Lacedaemonians took the child which had been the object of the mother’s preferential treatment, who was in fact the elder, and brought him up at public expense. His name was Eurysthenes, and his brother was called Procles. According to the Lacedaemonians, they spent the whole of their adult lives quarrelling with each other, despite the fact that they were brothers, and their descendants continue to do likewise.
[53] This version of events is unique to the Lacedaemonians, but I will now write down the usual account told by the Greeks. This is that the accepted Greek list of the kings of the Dorians back as far as Perseus the son of Danaë, but omitting the god, is correct. The list also proves, they say, that the Dorian kings were Greeks, because they were already being counted as Greeks as far back as then. I said ‘as far as Perseus’, but took the lineage no further back, because no human being is named as Perseus’ father (as Amphitryon is for Heracles, for instance). So I was right to say ‘as far as Perseus’. However, if one were to trace back, generation by generation, the lineage of Danaë the daughter of Acrisius, the chiefs of the Dorians would turn out to be true-born Egyptians.
[54] This is the Greek version of their genealogy, but there is a Persian account to the effect that Perseus was an Assyrian whose ancestors were not Greek, but who became Greek of his own accord. The forebears of Acrisius, they say, were not blood-relatives of Perseus at all, but came from Egypt (which agrees with the Greek account).
[55] Enough has been said about all this. Others have explained how and through what achievements they became kings over the Dorians, despite being Egyptians, and so I will not go into that. I will record things which others have not picked up.
[56] The kings have the following privileges, assigned to them by the Spartiates. They have two priesthoods, one of Zeus of Lacedaemon and one of Heavenly Zeus; they have the right to wage war against any country they choose, and no Spartiate is allowed to obstruct them in this, or he will be placed under a curse; on campaign, they must go first on the way out and last on the way back; they have a hundred picked men to guard them out on campaign; during military expeditions they can have as much of the livestock as they wish for their own use, and whenever any of these animals are sacrificed they get the skins and the backs.
[57] These are their prerogatives in times of war, but they have been granted a different set of rights in times of peace. On the occasion of a public sacrifice, the kings are the first to take their places at the feast, and the servers have to start with them and give each of the kings a double helping of everything, twice what the other diners receive. They have the right of pouring the first libation and the right to the skins of sacrificed animals. Every new moon, and on the seventh day of every month, each king is given, at public expense, an unblemished sacrificial victim for use in the temple of Apollo, a medimnus of barley, and a Laconian fourth of wine; and they have special seats of honour reserved for them at all the games. It is their privilege to appoint any citizen they like to act as the state’s diplomatic representatives, and each of them also gets to choose two Pythians. These Pythians act as emissaries to Delphi and are maintained along with the kings at public expense. If the kings do not come to the communal meals, two choenixes of barley and a cotyle of wine are sent to each of them at their private residences; if they do come, they are given a double helping of everything, and they receive the same preferential treatment when they are invited to a meal at someone’s house as well. They look after any oracles the state receives, although the Pythians are aware of their content too. The kings have the sole authority to decide who should marry an heiress whose father has died without having betrothed her to anyone, and to adjudicate in cases concerning the public highways. Also, if anyone wants to adopt a son, they have to do so in the presence of the kings. They attend the council meetings of the twenty-eight Elders; at any session they choose not to attend the Elders who are most closely related to them take on their privileges and cast two votes for the kings they are representing and then one for themselves.
[58] These are the rights the kings are granted by the Spartan government during their lifetimes. After their deaths, they gain further privileges. Horsemen ride all over Laconia announcing the news of a king’s death, while women beat on cauldrons as they parade through the city. At this signal, two people from each household (one man and one woman, neither of whom can be a slave) have to disfigure themselves in mourning, or else face a heavy fine. Lacedaemonian practice on the occasion of a king’s death can also be found outside of Greece in Asia; in fact, most non-Greeks there follow the same custom when their kings die. That is, when a king of the Lacedaemonians dies, a certain number of the perioeci, in addition to Spartiates, are required to come from all over Lacedaemon to attend the funeral. When they and the helots and the Spartiates are all gathered in their thousands in the one spot, men and women together passionately beat their foreheads and give way to endless lamenting, based on the claim, which they make each time, that this latest king to die was the best there ever was. They make statues of any king who dies in war, and carry the statue around on a lavishly covered bier. For ten days after the funeral the city square is closed for business and there are no sessions of electoral bodies; instead they devote the whole period to mourning.
[59] There is another respect in which Lacedaemonian custom resembles what happens in Persia. After a king’s death, another king succeeds him, and this new king frees any Spartiate who was in debt to the king or to the state. In Persia too the newly appointed king cancels the outstanding tribute owed by any community.
[60] There is also a respect in which Lacedaemonians resemble Egyptians. Town-criers, pipe-players, and cooks inherit their work from their fathers; each of them is the son of a father who carried on the same trade. They cannot be displaced by others coming along and taking up town-crying, for instance, on the basis of possessing a strong, clear voice: these jobs are inherited. Anyway, that is enough on these matters.
[61] To resume: Cleomenes was on Aegina, working for the common good of Greece, but Demaratus, motivated not by any concern for Aegina, but by malice and envy, was blackening his name. On his return from Aegina, Cleomenes began to think about deposing Demaratus, and he found a pretext for attacking him in something his father Ariston had done. When Ariston was king of Sparta he had married twice, but without producing any children. Because he refused to entertain the idea that he was responsible, he took a third wife. The circumstances of this third marriage were as follows. His closest friend was a Spartiate whose wife happened to be by far the most beautiful woman in Sparta—and what is more she had become that beautiful after having been repulsive! She was an ugly girl, but she had a nurse and the nurse had an idea. The nurse was motivated not just by the fact that the girl was ugly, but also by the wealth of the girl’s family; besides, it was clear to her that the girl’s parents thought her looks a catastrophe. So she took her every day to the shrine of Helen in Therapne, which overlooks the sanctuary of Phoebus Apollo. Every time the nurse brought her there, she would put her in front of Helen’s statue and ask the goddess to take away the child’s ugliness. And at last, the story goes, just as the nurse was leaving the shrine one day, a woman appeared and asked her what she was carrying in her arms. When the nurse replied that it was a child, the woman asked her to uncover it, but the nurse refused, and explained that the child’s parents had told her not to show the child to anyone. The woman insisted on seeing the child anyway, and eventually, seeing that the woman made so much of seeing the child, the nurse showed it to her. The woman stroked the child’s head and said that she would be the most beautiful woman in Sparta. From that day on, the girl’s looks changed, and when the time came for her to have a husband, Agetus the son of Alcidas married her—and it was this Agetus who was Ariston’s friend.
[62] Ariston was, as it turned out, tortured by a passionate longing for this woman, and so he came up with a plan. He promised his friend, the husband of the woman in question, that he would give him as a present anything he wanted, any single item he owned, and he asked his friend to give him a similar present as well, on the same terms. Agetus was not worried about his wife at all, because he could see that Ariston already had a wife, so he agreed to the suggestion. They sealed the bargain with oaths. Ariston gave Agetus whatever it was that Agetus requested from among his valuables, and then it was Ariston’s turn to ask for a present in return from him, so he tried to take his friend’s wife. Agetus said that she was excluded from the deal—that Ariston could have anything else except for her—but the oath he had sworn and Ariston’s deceitful trick left him no choice, and he let him take his wife.
[63] So Ariston divorced his second wife and married for the third time. Before very long—in fact, before ten months were up—his new wife gave birth to a child, who was Demaratus. Ariston was in session with the ephors at the time, and a house-slave brought the news of the child’s birth. On the basis of knowing the date of his marriage, Ariston calculated on his fingers the number of months that had passed and then exclaimed with an oath: ‘He can’t be mine!’ The ephors heard him say this, but they did not make anything of it at the time. The boy grew, and Ariston came to regret his remark, because he became convinced that Demaratus was his son. The reason he called him Demaratus, the people’s prayer, was that some time before these events the whole Spartiate population had offered up a prayer for the birth of a son to Ariston, whom they regarded as the most outstanding king there had ever been in Sparta. That is how Demaratus came by his name.
[64] Time passed. Ariston died and Demaratus became king. But apparently it was fated that these things would become general knowledge and would lead to Demaratus losing his kingdom, thanks to the fact that† there was a great deal of bad feeling between him and Cleomenes; this had manifested itself earlier, when Demaratus withdrew the army from Eleusis, and in particular now, when Cleomenes went over to Aegina to deal with the Persian collaborators on the island.
[65] Now that he was determined to take revenge, Cleomenes made a deal with Leotychidas, the son of Menares and grandson of Agis, who was of the same lineage as Demaratus. Their arrangement was that in return for being made king in Demaratus’ place, Leotychidas would join Cleomenes’ expedition against Aegina. What had made Leotychidas such a bitter enemy of Demaratus was that when Leotychidas was betrothed to Percalus the daughter of Chilon the son of Demarmenus, Demaratus had deliberately robbed Leotychidas of his marriage by carrying Percalus away first and making her his wife instead. That is what had turned Leotychidas against Demaratus. At the time in question, Leotychidas, at Cleomenes’ instigation, swore a complaint against Demaratus to the effect that he was not a legitimate king of Sparta because he was not the son of Ariston; then he followed up this affidavit by prosecuting Demaratus in court. During the trial he resuscitated the old remark Ariston had made in response to the house-slave’s news of the child’s birth, when he had calculated the number of months and exclaimed with an oath that the child was not his. Leotychidas took his stand upon this remark and argued that Demaratus was not Ariston’s child and had no right to rule Sparta. He had the ephors who had been at the meeting and had heard Ariston’s words come forward to testify in support of his case.
[66] The legal battle raged back and forth, and in the end the Spartiates decided to ask the Delphic oracle whether Demaratus was Ariston’s son. The issue was referred to the Pythia by Cleomenes, because this suited his plan; he next got the most influential person in Delphi, Cobon the son of Aristophantus, on to his side, and Cobon persuaded the oracle’s prophetess, Periallas† to give the answer Cleomenes wanted to hear. So when the emissaries put their question to the Pythia, she pronounced in favour of Demaratus not being Ariston’s son. Later, however, word leaked out about what had gone on; Cobon was banished from Delphi and Periallas the prophetess was deprived of her office.
[67] That is how Demaratus came to be deposed. He ended up in Persia, in exile from Sparta, but that was due to an insult. What happened was that after he had been deposed, he held an elected office. During the Festival of Unarmed Dancing Demaratus was looking on, and Leotychidas (who had by then taken his place as king) sent an attendant with a mocking, sarcastic question: he asked Demaratus what it was like to be an official after having been king. Stung by the question, Demaratus replied, ‘I have experienced both; you have not. Lacedaemon, however, will meet with either a great deal of misery or a great deal of happiness as a result of your question.’ With these words he covered his head, left the theatre, and went home. Then he immediately got everything ready and set about offering an ox to Zeus. Once he had finished performing the sacrifice, he asked his mother to come and see him.
[68] When she arrived, he put some of the entrails into her hands and solemnly asked her to help him. ‘Mother,’ he said, ‘I beg you in the name of all the gods, especially Zeus the guardian of our house, to tell me the truth. Who, in all honesty, is my father? Leotychidas claimed during the court case that you were already pregnant by your former husband when you went to Ariston, and others tell the even stupider tale that you went to bed with one of the house-slaves—the muleteer—and that he is my father. So I implore you in the name of the gods to tell me the truth. After all, if you did do any of the things you are supposed to have done, you certainly weren’t the first. And Ariston is commonly rumoured in Sparta to have been sterile, because otherwise his other wives would have had children.’
[69] This is how he spoke, and his mother replied: ‘All right, son. If it’s the truth you so earnestly want from me, the truth is what you will hear—the whole truth. On the third night after Ariston had brought me to his house as his wife, I was visited by a phantom which looked just like Ariston. After it had slept with me, it put on me the garlands it was wearing, and then went away. Later, Ariston came in. When he saw me wearing garlands, he asked me who had given them to me. I told him that he had, but he assured me that he hadn’t. I swore that he had and said that it was wrong of him to deny it, because he had given me the garlands just a short while previously, after he had come and slept with me. It was obvious that I was serious, and so Ariston realized that this was the gods’ doing. Two further clues pointed in the same direction: first, the garlands turned out to have come from the shrine by the courtyard door, which is said to be the shrine of the hero Astrabacus, and, second, the diviners we consulted named Astrabacus as the one who had slept with me. So now you know everything, my son, that you wanted to hear. That was the night you were conceived, so either your birth is due to this hero, in which case Astrabacus is your father, or your father is Ariston. As for the main piece of evidence your enemies use to attack you—the charge that at the news of your birth Ariston himself, in front of many witnesses, said that you were not his son, since there hadn’t been enough time—well, he blurted it out in complete ignorance of these matters. Not all pregnancies last the full ten months: women give birth to children after nine months and seven months as well. You were a seven-month baby. Ariston himself soon came to see that his remark had been made in ignorance. Now that you know the whole truth, you needn’t listen to any of the other tales about your birth. As for Leotychidas and his fellow rumour-mongers, let their wives have children by donkey-men!’
[70] His mother’s words gave Demaratus all the information he wanted. He took everything he would need for a journey and set out for Elis. He told people that he was going to Delphi to consult the oracle, but the Lacedaemonians suspected that he was trying to flee the country and started out in pursuit. Somehow he crossed over to Zacynthos from Elis before they could catch up with him, but the Lacedaemonians crossed over after him and tried to arrest him. They succeeded in getting his attendants away from him, but the people of Zacynthos would not let them have Demaratus, and he sailed over to Asia and made his way to King Darius, who received him with great pomp, and gave him land and settlements. So these were the turns of fortune that brought Demaratus to Asia, after he had won glory among the Lacedaemonians time and time again by his actions and his intelligence. Once, for instance, he gave them a victory at Olympia by winning with his four-horse chariot, which is something no other Spartan king ever achieved.
[71] After Demaratus had been deposed, Leotychidas the son of Menares succeeded to the kingdom. Leotychidas had a son whose name was Zeuxidamus (or Cyniscus, as some Spartiates used to call him) who did not become king of Sparta, because he died before Leotychidas, but he left Archidamus as his son. After the loss of Zeuxidamus, Leotychidas remarried; this second wife of his was called Eurydame, and she was the sister of Menius and daughter of Diactoridas. She bore Leotychidas no sons, but a daughter called Lampito, whom Leotychidas gave in marriage to Archidamus the son of Zeuxidamus.
[72] However, Leotychidas paid for what he did to Demaratus: he did not reach old age in Sparta either. He led a military expedition to Thessaly, and although he could have subdued the whole country, he was bribed with a lot of money not to. He was caught red-handed in the camp, sitting on a glove filled with money, and as a result he was tried and banished from Sparta, and his house was torn down. He went into exile in Tegea, and that is where he died.
[73] But this was all in the future. At the time in question, Cleomenes was still smarting from the insults he had received on Aegina, so as soon as he had the problem with Demaratus well in hand he took Leotychidas and went after the Aeginetans. With both kings coming against them at once, the Aeginetans decided not to resist. Cleomenes and Leotychidas picked out the ten Aeginetans whose wealth and lineage made them the most important members of the community and took them away. Among the ten prisoners were Crius the son of Polycritus and Casambus the son of Aristocrates, who were the most influential men on the island. Cleomenes and Demaratus took their prisoners to Attica and left them in the safe keeping of the Athenians, who were the Aeginetans’ worst enemies.
[74] Some time later, however, when information about his dishonest plots against Demaratus leaked out, Cleomenes became afraid of what the Spartiates would do and slipped out of the country to Thessaly. From there he went to Arcadia, where he proceeded to stir up trouble by uniting the inhabitants against Sparta. He made the Arcadians swear that they would follow his lead come what may, and on top of the other oaths he had them swear, he tried his best to get the leading Arcadians to go with him to the town of Nonacris and swear an oath of loyalty on the waters of the Styx. According to the Arcadians the waters of the Styx are to be found in this town, and in fact it is true that a trickle of water drips out of a rock there and into a basin, which has been encircled by a wall. Nonacris, where this spring is to be found, is a town in Arcadia near Pheneus.
[75] When the Lacedaemonians found out what Cleomenes was up to, they became worried. They brought him home to Sparta† and restored him to his kingship with no change to his former status. Now, Cleomenes had been more or less insane before, and no sooner had he got back to Sparta than he succumbed to an illness† whose symptoms were that he used to poke his staff into the face of any Spartiate he met. Faced with this behaviour and his derangement, his relatives put him in the stocks. While he was in the stocks, he was left with only a single guard, and when he noticed this, he began to ask the guard to give him a knife. At first the guard refused, but Cleomenes intimidated him by threatening him with future punishment, and eventually the guard, who was only a helot, gave him a knife. Cleomenes took hold of the weapon and began to mutilate himself by cutting strips of flesh off his body. He started with his shins and moved up from there to his thighs, and then on to his hips and his sides, until he began slicing into his stomach, at which point he died. The Greeks most commonly attribute the manner of his death to the fact that he had persuaded the Pythia to say what she did about Demaratus, but the Athenians say that it was because during his assault on Eleusis he cut down the trees in the precinct of the gods. According to the Argives, however, it was because he induced the Argives who had taken refuge in the sanctuary of Argos after the battle between Argos and Sparta to come down from the sanctuary, and then massacred them and, showing no respect for the sacred grove, burnt it down.
[76] Cleomenes had consulted Delphi and been told that he would capture Argos. On his way with his Spartiate troops he reached the River Erasinus, which is said to flow from the Stymphalian Lake; to be precise, this lake is supposed to drain into an immeasurably deep chasm and then re-emerge in Argos, at which point the waters begin to be called the Erasinus by the Argives. Anyway, once Cleomenes reached this river he offered a sacrifice to the river-god, but the omens were not at all favourable for his crossing. In response, however, he said that he admired the god for refusing to betray his citizens, but even so the Argives were not going to get off lightly. Then he pulled his men back to Thyreae, sacrificed a bull to the sea, and transported them by boat to the territory of Tiryns and Nauplia.
[77] When the Argives got wind of this they came down to the coast to meet him. They positioned themselves facing the Lacedaemonians, and not far from their camp, at a place called Sepeia, which is near Tiryns. Now, the Argives were not worried about the prospect of an open battle, but were afraid of falling prey to trickery. The reason for this was that they had an oracle which referred to such an eventuality. It was in a prediction delivered by the Pythia which they and the Milesians shared, and it ran as follows:
But when female conquers male and expels him,
When glory in Argos redounds to her name,
She will set Argive women a-plenty tearing their cheeks;
And so it will be said by future generations that a fearful
Thrice-coiled snake fell before the spear and perished.
It was the conjunction of all these events that made the Argives afraid. Under these circumstances they decided to make use of the enemy’s crier—that is, to copy the Lacedaemonians every time the Spartiate crier issued an order.
[78] When Cleomenes noticed that the Argives were following every command the Spartiate crier was issuing, he told his men that the next time the crier announced that it was time for them to eat, they should pick up their weapons and attack the Argives. And that is exactly what the Lacedaemonians did. The Argives had followed the crier’s command and were busy with their meal when the Lacedaemonians attacked them. Argive losses were heavy, but far more of their troops took refuge in the grove of Argus, where the Lacedaemonians surrounded them and waited.
[79] Cleomenes next questioned the Argive deserters he had among his troops. As a result of what he learnt, he sent a herald calling on the Argives who were shut up in the grounds of the sanctuary to leave; he called them personally by name, and told them that their ransoms had been paid. (The Peloponnesians have a fixed rate for ransoming a prisoner of war, of two minas per man.) About fifty of the Argives responded one by one to Cleomenes’ summons by coming out—and Cleomenes had them killed. Now, for a while the ones who remained in the precinct were unaware of the situation because there were too many trees for those inside the grove to see what was happening to those outside it, but at last someone climbed a tree and saw what was going on. Consequently, of course, they stopped coming out of the grove when their names were called.
[80] Cleomenes then got every single one of his helots to pile up wood around the grove, and once they had carried out his order he set the place alight. The flames had just caught hold when he asked one of the deserters which god the grove belonged to; ‘Argus’, came the reply. When Cleomenes heard this he gave a great groan and said, ‘Apollo, god of prophecy, you seriously misled me when you foretold that I would capture Argos; I think your prediction has now come true.’
[81] Cleomenes next dismissed most of his troops and sent them back to Sparta, while he himself went with a thousand elite soldiers to the temple of Hera, with the intention of offering a sacrifice at her altar. But the priest forbade him from doing so, citing the rule that it is sacrilege for foreigners to perform sacrifices there. So Cleomenes ordered his helots to remove the priest from the altar and whip him, and he carried out the ritual by himself. Then he returned to Sparta.
[82] Back in Sparta, his enemies brought him before the ephors on the charge of having accepted a bribe not to take Argos, which, they claimed, he could easily have taken. I do not know for sure whether or not he was telling the truth, but in any case his response was to say that, in his opinion, the god’s prediction had come true once he had captured the sanctuary of Argus and so, under these circumstances, he had decided not to attack the city until he had offered sacrifices and discovered whether the gods would let the city fall into his hands or would block the endeavour. He went on to explain that when he was seeking a favourable omen in the temple of Hera a flame had burst out from the statue’s breast, and he had realized the truth, which was that he would not capture Argos. If the flame had burst from the statue’s head, he said, he would have captured the city from the top of the acropolis downwards; but since it came from the breast he decided that he had already done everything the gods wanted him to do. The Spartiates found this defence of his plausible and reasonable, and so he was acquitted, by a large majority, on the charge his prosecutors had brought against him.
[83] Argos was so short of men that their slaves took over the government and administration of the city’s affairs at all levels, until the sons of those who had died grew up, regained control of Argos, and expelled the slaves. The displaced slaves then fought a successful battle for the possession of Tiryns. For a while there was harmony between the two states, but then the slaves were joined by a diviner called Cleander, a native of Phigalea in Arcadia, who persuaded them to attack their masters. The resulting war lasted a long time, but in the end, with great difficulty, the Argives won.
[84] So that is why Cleomenes went mad and died such a horrible death, according to the Argives. The Spartiates themselves deny, however, that his insanity was of supernatural origin; according to them the time he had spent with the Scythians gave him the habit of drinking his wine neat and that was what caused his madness. What happened, on this version, was that the nomadic Scythians longed to make Darius pay for his invasion of their land, so they sent agents to Sparta to ask them to become their allies and to agree to a plan whereby the Scythians themselves would try to invade Media along the Phasis River, while the Spartiates, they suggested, would set out inland from Ephesus to join them. So the story goes that Cleomenes spent a lot of time—an abnormal amount of time—with this Scythian delegation and acquired the habit of drinking undiluted wine from them. And that is what drove him mad, according to the Spartiates. Ever since then, they say that they want to drink ‘Scythian fashion’ when they want to drink stronger wine than usual. So that is the Spartiate explanation of what happened to Cleomenes. My own view is that it was punishment for what Cleomenes did to Demaratus.
[85] When news of Cleomenes’ death reached Aegina, the islanders sent agents to Sparta to denounce Leotychidas over the business of the hostages who were being held in Athens. The Lacedaemonians convened a court which decided that Leotychidas had treated the Aeginetans over-harshly and sentenced him to be surrendered to the islanders in compensation for the men who were being held in Athens. The Aeginetans were poised to take Leotychidas away when they were addressed by Theasidas the son of Leoprepes, who was a man of distinction in Sparta. ‘Men of Aegina,’ he said, ‘what is this? Are you really planning to remove the king of Sparta? He may have been surrendered to you by his citizens, but if this was a decision taken in anger, you’d better watch out in case sometime in the future they pay you back with the complete destruction of your land.’ His words made the Aeginetans stop their removal of Leotychidas. Instead they made a deal with him, that he would come with them to Athens and recover the hostages for them.
[86] When Leotychidas went to Athens and asked the Athenians to return the men left in their safe keeping, he found them reluctant to do so. They came up with various excuses, such as that they had been entrusted with the hostages by two kings, so it would be wrong of them to return them to one king without the other one being there too. Faced with their refusal to return the hostages Leotychidas said, ‘Men of Athens, it’s up to you to choose. You can either return the hostages, which would be right, or not, which would be the opposite. But on the subject of safe keeping, I’d like you to hear a story we Spartiates tell about something that once happened in Sparta. In Lacedaemon, three generations back, there was a man called Glaucus, who was the son of Epicydas. He was the foremost man of his generation in Lacedaemon, and was particularly famous for his integrity. The story we tell concerns something that happened to him in the fullness of time.
‘A Milesian came to Sparta to meet Glaucus, with a proposition to put to him. “Glaucus,” he said, “I’m a Milesian and I’ve come all this way because I want to enjoy the benefits of your honesty. You’re well known all over Greece, even in Ionia, as a man of integrity. I got to thinking about how risky a place Ionia always is, compared with the stability of the Peloponnese, and about how property never remains in the same hands there, as everyone can see. With these thoughts and ideas in mind, then, I decided to convert half my property into money and to deposit it with you, because I had no doubt that in your hands it would be safe. So please accept this money, and here also are some tokens for you to take and keep. When someone comes to you with the matching tallies and asks for the money, give it to him.”
‘That was what the visitor from Miletus said. Glaucus agreed to his terms and accepted the deposit for safe keeping. Many years later the sons of the man who had left the money with Glaucus came to Sparta. They spoke to Glaucus, showed him the tallies, and asked for the money back. But his response to their request was to try to put them off. “I have no recollection of this matter,” he said. “My mind’s a complete blank as regards what you’re talking about. Still, if something does occur to me I shall act with total integrity: if I did take the deposit, I will give it back, and if I never had it, my treatment of you will conform to normal Greek practice in such cases. I will therefore postpone settling the matter for three months.”
‘The Milesians were devastated; they went away convinced that they had been robbed of their money. Meanwhile, Glaucus went to Delphi to consult the oracle. His question was whether he could swear an oath and so get away with stealing the money. The Pythia rebuked him with the following words:
Yes, Glaucus, Epicydas’ son, in the short term you will gain
If you use an oath to have your way and steal the money.
Swear an oath: after all, death awaits even an honest man.
But Oath has a nameless child. Though it has no hands
Or feet, it is swift in pursuit, until it has seized
All a man’s offspring, all his house, and destroyed them.
But an honest man’s offspring will gain in the long run.
‘At this, Glaucus asked the god to forgive him for his question, but the Pythia said that seeking the god’s permission for a crime and actually committing the crime amounted to the same thing.
‘Glaucus sent for the Milesian visitors and gave them back their money. But here is the point of the story, the reason why I mentioned it to you Athenians: today there is not a single descendant of Glaucus alive, nor is there a single household that is considered to stem from Glaucus. He has been utterly and completely eradicated from Sparta. This just goes to show the advantage of not even thinking anything about a deposit with which one has been entrusted except how to give it back when one is asked for it.’ Even this story failed to move the Athenians, however, so Leotychidas went home.
[87] Despite the fact that the Aeginetans still had not paid for the wrong they had done Athens earlier as a favour to the Thebans, they put the blame on the Athenians and felt that it was they, the Aeginetans, who were the injured party. Consequently, they prepared to exact revenge on Athens. Now, once every four years the Athenians held a festival at Sunium, so what the Aeginetans did was ambush the delegates’ ship and capture it, and along with it all the important Athenians on board, who became the Aeginetans’ prisoners.
[88] After this assault by the Aeginetans the Athenians no longer felt any compunction about doing everything they could to inflict damage on them. Now, there was an eminent Aeginetan called Nicodromus the son of Cnoethus who had once been banished from the island and was still nursing a grudge against his fellow citizens. When Nicodromus realized that the Athenians were serious in their determination to harm the Aeginetans, he arranged to betray the island to them. He told them the day when he would make the attempt and expect them to arrive with reinforcements. Later, then, he occupied what is known as the Old Town (which was his side of the deal with the Athenians), but the Athenians failed to turn up as they were supposed to.
[89] They had asked the Corinthians for some ships, because their own fleet was in fact no match for the Aeginetans in a sea battle, and this delay was enough to ruin the whole enterprise. The Corinthians and the Athenians were on very good terms in those days, so the Corinthians responded to the Athenian request by giving them twenty ships—though actually they charged five drachmas per ship, because there was a law forbidding them from just giving them away for nothing. With these ships as well as their own, the Athenians made up a fleet of seventy ships in all and sailed against Aegina. But they arrived a day later than they had agreed to.
[90] When the Athenians failed to arrive on time, Nicodromus and a number of other Aeginetans fled from the island by boat. The Athenians let them live in Sunium, and they used their new home as a base from which to raid the Aeginetans on their island.
[91] But these raids happened later. The popular uprising on Aegina which had been led by Nicodromus was put down by the men of substance, who then proceeded to lead the captive rebels out of the town to kill them. Ever since then they were under a curse, which they were unable to expiate by ritual means, for all their efforts; instead they were banished from the island before they could win the goddess over. What happened was that they were in the process of taking seven hundred prisoners out of the town for execution when one of them broke free of his chains and took refuge at the porch of the temple of Demeter the Lawgiver, where he seized the door handles and hung on to them. They could not get him to let go by pulling him away from the door, so they chopped off his hands and took him away for execution like that—while his hands remained gripping the handles.
[92] That is what the Aeginetans did to their own people. In the battle that took place once the Athenians arrived with their fleet of seventy ships, the Aeginetans came off worst and appealed for help to the same people who had responded on an earlier occasion, the Argives. But the Argives refused to help this time, because they were angry with Aegina. Some Aeginetan ships which had been seized by Cleomenes had landed in Argolis, and the crews had helped the Lacedaemonians in a foray ashore—a raid in which the Lacedaemonians also received the support of men from Sicyonian ships. The Argives then imposed a fine of 1,000 talents, 500 talents each. While the Sicyonians acknowledged their guilt and agreed to pay a hundred talents to clear themselves, the Aeginetans stubbornly refused to admit that they were in the wrong. Consequently, no one in Argos was prepared to send official state help in response to the Aeginetan appeal, but they raised a volunteer force of about a thousand men, led by Eurybates, a specialist in the pentathlon. Most of these men did not make it back home again, but died on Aegina in the battle with the Athenians. Eurybates, their commander, specialized in single combat during the fight and killed the first three men who came up against him, but was himself killed by the fourth, who was Sophanes of Decelea.
[93] At sea, however, the Aeginetans caught the Athenians in disarray and won the ensuing engagement. They captured four Athenian ships, crews and all.
[94] So Athens and Aegina were at war. Meanwhile, the Persian king was pursuing his own designs. He had his attendant constantly reminding him to remember the Athenians, and the Pisistratidae by his side turning him against Athens. Moreover, Darius himself wanted to make this into a pretext for conquering the Greek states which had refused to give him earth and water. He relieved Mardonius of his command, because his expedition had been so unsuccessful, and appointed others in his place to command the campaign he was planning against Eretria and Athens. These new military commanders were a Mede called Datis and Artaphrenes the son of Artaphrenes, who was Darius’ nephew. The mission he gave them was to reduce Athens and Eretria to slavery and to bring the captives before him.
[95] These newly appointed commanders left the king’s presence and made their way to Cilicia, to the Aleian Plain there, at the head of a huge, well-equipped land army. While they were encamped there they were joined by the whole naval force which the various states had been required to raise, and the horse-transport ships that Darius had ordered his tribute-paying subjects to build the year before. The horses were put on board these transport vessels, the land army embarked, and the fleet of six hundred triremes set sail for Ionia. But they did not then head straight for the Hellespont and Thrace along the Ionian coast; instead they set out from Samos to Icaria, and then sailed from island to island. I imagine that they went this way because they were particularly apprehensive about trying to sail around Athos, because of the disaster they had met with on this route the year before. Besides, the fact that they had left Naxos untaken forced their hand.
[96] After crossing the Icarian Sea, the Persians made for Naxos and landed there, since they had decided to make it the first place they attacked. The Naxians did not stay to fight the Persians, but fled to the hills, mindful of what had happened before. The Persians enslaved any of them they caught, and also burnt their sanctuaries and the town. Then they set off to attack other islands.
[97] In the mean time, the Delians also fled: they abandoned Delos and went to Tenos. As his forces were drawing near the island, Datis sailed ahead and told the fleet to anchor across the straits at Rhenaea, rather than off Delos. Once he found out where the Delians were, he sent a message to them, through a herald. ‘Reverend gentlemen, why have you run away?’ he asked. ‘You must have a mistaken impression of me. Even if it weren’t for the king’s instructions, I would certainly have enough sense, faced with the birthplace of the two gods, not to inflict the slightest harm on either the land itself or its inhabitants. So why don’t you return to your homes and come back to live in Delos?’ This was the message Datis delivered to the Delians. He then heaped up three hundred talents of frankincense on the altar and burnt it as an offering.
[98] Datis then sailed away with his army, which included Ionian and Aeolian contingents; the next place he made for was Eretria. But after he had withdrawn his men from the area, Delos was shaken by an earthquake, which, according to the Delians, had never happened before and has never happened since, up to my day. This was an omen sent by the god, surely, to warn people of the trouble that was to come. After all, for three successive generations—during the reigns of Darius the son of Hystaspes, Xerxes the son of Darius, and Artaxerxes the son of Xerxes—Greece suffered more than it had for twenty generations before Darius, partly as a result of Persian action there, but partly because of power struggles between the leading Greek states. So it was hardly surprising that an earthquake should have struck Delos, even though it had never experienced one before. Moreover, there was on record a prediction about the island, which said, ‘I will also shake Delos, previously unshaken.’ Translated into Greek the names Darius, Xerxes, and Artaxerxes mean respectively ‘doer of deeds’, ‘man of war’, and ‘great man of war’. Those would be the correct Greek equivalents of these kings’ names.
[99] After they had sailed away from Delos, the Persians stopped off at the Aegean islands, where they rounded up troops for their army and took the islanders’ children along with them as hostages. During this voyage from island to island, they also landed at Carystus. The people there refused to hand over hostages or to supply troops for any campaign against neighbouring states (meaning Eretria and Athens), so the Persians proceeded to besiege the place and to devastate their farmlands, until the Carystians too were brought into the Persian fold.
[100] The Eretrians reacted to the news that the Persian forces were sailing against them by asking Athens for assistance, which the Athenians gladly offered in the form of the four thousand smallholders who were occupying the land of the Horse-farmers in Chalcis. As it turned out, however, the Eretrians did not have a sound general strategy. Although they had asked for the Athenians, they were in two minds about what plan to adopt. Some of them were recommending that they should abandon the city and take to the Euboean hill country, while others (motivated by the prospect of being personally rewarded by Darius) were preparing to surrender the city. When Aeschines the son of Nothon, who was one of the Eretrian leaders, saw how things stood with these two factions, he explained the situation to those of the Athenians who had already arrived and begged them to return to their own city, to avoid being caught up in the destruction of Eretria. The Athenians followed Aeschines’ advice.
[101] So these Athenians sailed across to Oropus and saved themselves. Meanwhile, the Persian fleet landed in Eretrian territory, at Tamynae, Choereae, and Aegilia. As soon as they had beached their ships in these places, they proceeded to put the horses ashore and got ready to mount an assault against their enemies. The Eretrian plan was to avoid making sorties and meeting the Persians in battle outside the city; now that the plan not to abandon the city had won out, their concern was to defend their walls, if they could. The attack on the city was fierce, and losses were heavy on both sides. After six days of fighting, however, two eminent Eretrians—Euphorbus the son of Alcimachus and Philagrus the son of Cyneas—betrayed the city to the Persians. Once they were inside the city, the Persians not only plundered the sanctuaries and set them on fire, in revenge for the burning of the sanctuaries in Sardis, but also reduced the population to slavery, just as Darius had commanded.
[102] The Persians waited a few days after the fall of Eretria and then set sail for Attica, pressing on hard, and confident that they would deal with Athens just as they had with Eretria. Now, Marathon was the place in Attica which combined terrain that was admirably suited to cavalry manoeuvres and proximity to Eretria, so this was the place where Hippias the son of Pisistratus directed them.
[103] When the Athenians heard the news, they too marched out to Marathon. There were ten military commanders in charge of the Athenian forces, one of whom was Miltiades, whose father Cimon the son of Stesagoras had been forced into exile from Athens by Pisistratus the son of Hippocrates. It was during his exile that he won a victory at Olympia with his four-horse chariot, thereby matching the victory won by Miltiades, his half-brother on his mother’s side. At the very next Olympics, he won again with the same team of horses, but he allowed Pisistratus to be declared the winner—an action which reconciled him to Pisistratus and so enabled him to return to Athens under a truce. The same team of horses gained him victory at a subsequent Olympic Games, but then, as it happened, he was killed by Pisistratus’ sons (Pisistratus himself was no longer alive). The Pisistratidae killed him by getting assassins to surprise him one night in the town hall. Cimon is buried outside Athens, on the far side of the road called ‘through Coele’. The mares which won him three victories at Olympia are buried opposite him. This record has also been equalled by the team of horses that belonged to Euagoras of Laconia, but so far they are the only ones to have done so. At the time of the murder, Cimon’s eldest son Stesagoras was being brought up in the house of his uncle, Miltiades, in the Chersonese, but the younger son was with Cimon in Athens. He was named Miltiades after the founder of the Chersonese.
[104] So this was the Miltiades who at the time in question was a commander of the Athenian forces. He had come to live in Athens after a period in the Chersonese, and had twice escaped death. In the first place, the Phoenicians who chased him as far as Imbros placed a very high premium on capturing him and taking him to Darius. In the second place, after his escape from these Phoenicians, when he had returned home to apparent safety at last, he found his enemies waiting for him; they prosecuted him for his tyranny in the Chersonese, but he escaped from their clutches too. Later he was appointed by the people of Athens to the post of military commander.
[105] The first thing the commanders did—and this was before they left the city—was send Philippides (an Athenian who was a professional courier) to Sparta with a message. According to Philippides himself, and as he told the Athenians, he had an encounter with Pan near Mount Parthenium, which overlooks Tegea. Pan called out his name, he claimed, and told him to take the following message to the Athenians: ‘Why do you ignore me, when I am a friend of Athens? I have often been of service to you in the past, and will be again in the future too.’ The Athenians believed in the authenticity of this experience, and later, when their affairs had prospered, they built a sanctuary of Pan under the Acropolis, and on the basis of this message of his they worship him with annual sacrifices and a torch-race.
[106] Anyway, to resume: Philippides was sent by the military commanders on the mission during which he claimed to have had a vision of Pan, and he arrived in Sparta the day after leaving Athens. He went to the leaders and said: ‘Men of Lacedaemon, Athens requests your assistance. We beg you not to stand by and watch the most ancient city in Greece be enslaved by a foreign power. Eretria has already been reduced to slavery, thus making Greece weaker by one notable city than it was before.’ This was the message he delivered to the Lacedaemonians, as he had been instructed. The Lacedaemonian decision was to come to Athens’ assistance, but they could not do so straight away, because there was a law they were reluctant to break. It was the ninth day of the month, and they said that they would not send an army into the field then or until the moon was full.
[107] So the Lacedaemonians were waiting for the full moon, and the invaders had Hippias the son of Pisistratus as their guide to Marathon. The previous night Hippias had dreamt that he slept with his own mother. He interpreted the dream to mean that he would return to Athens, regain his political position, and die of old age in his homeland. Anyway, that was the meaning he got from the dream. As the Persian guide, first he unloaded the Eretrian prisoners on Aegilia, the island belonging to Styra, and then he beached the ships at Marathon, made them fast there, and disposed the Persian troops once they were on dry land. Now, he was in the middle of arranging the troops when he was seized by an unusually violent fit of sneezing and coughing. Since he was fairly old, most of his teeth were loose, and the force of his sneezing caused one of them to fall out into the sand. He spent a lot of time looking for it. When he failed to find the tooth he groaned and remarked to the people near by, ‘This land is not ours. We will never be able to conquer it. The only bit of it that belonged to me has been claimed by my tooth.’
[108] So Hippias concluded that this incident was the fulfilment of his dream. The Athenians had already formed up in the precinct of Heracles when the Plataeans arrived with all their available manpower to reinforce them. They did so because they were subjects of Athens, and the Athenians had often in the past spared no effort on Plataea’s behalf. Here is how the Plataeans became Athenian subjects. They were being pressured by the Thebans, and Cleomenes the son of Anaxandridas happened to be in the country with some Lacedaemonian troops. The Plataeans first offered themselves to Sparta, but the Lacedaemonians rejected the offer, saying, ‘We live too far away to be anything but feeble help to you. You could be enslaved many times over before any of us even heard about it. But why don’t you offer yourselves to the Athenians, who are your neighbours and can provide pretty effective assistance?’ This suggestion by the Lacedaemonians was prompted not by goodwill towards the Plataeans so much as because they wanted the Athenians to have all the trouble of coming into conflict with the Boeotians. Anyway, the Plataeans took their advice; they came and sat as suppliants at the altar while the Athenians were celebrating the Festival of the Twelve Gods, and committed themselves to become a subject state of Athens. The Theban response to the news was to march against Plataea, whereupon the Athenians came to help the Plataeans. Battle was just about to be joined when the Corinthians, who happened to be near by, intervened. The two sides accepted Corinthian arbitration, and the Corinthians fixed the borders between the territories of Plataea and Thebes. They made it part of the agreement that the Thebans should not put pressure on any Boeotians who did not want to join the Boeotian League. After brokering this settlement, the Corinthians left—and as the Athenians were withdrawing, the Boeotians attacked them, but they lost the battle. The Athenians crossed over into Theban territory, beyond the border which the Corinthians had fixed for Plataea, and then went so far as to make the River Asopus the place where Theban territory ended and that belonging to Plataea and Hysiae began. That, then, is how the Plataeans came to be committed to the Athenian cause, and so they now came to Marathon to fight alongside the Athenians.
[109] The Athenian commanders were in two minds as to how to proceed. Some said that they should avoid fighting, on the grounds that they were outnumbered by the Persian army; others, including Miltiades, were in favour of it. Now, there was an eleventh person there who could cast a vote—the War Archon, who was selected by lot; the post had long been established at Athens as having parity with the commanders when it came to voting. At the time in question it was Callimachus of Aphidnae who was the War Archon. So since the commanders were divided, and since the more cowardly view was beginning to gain the upper hand, Miltiades approached Callimachus and said, ‘The future of Athens lies in your hands now, Callimachus. You can either cast us down into slavery or win us our freedom—and thereby ensure that you will be remembered as long as there are people alive on this earth, with a higher reputation even than Harmodius and Aristogiton. Athens’ position is more precarious now than it ever has been before, throughout its history. There are two alternatives: submission to the Persians—and we have seen what will happen if we fall into Hippias’ hands—or victory, in which case we might well become the leading city in Greece. How could that happen, you ask? And why is it up to you to determine the course of events? I will explain. The ten generals are evenly divided between those who want to engage the enemy, and those who are advising against it. Failure to take the enemy on will, I’m sure, generate serious civil war, and in the upheaval the Athenians will be disposed to collaborate with the Persians. However, if we engage the enemy before this or any other unsound view infects the minds of some Athenians, and if the gods are impartial, we can get the better of the Persians in the battle. So it is entirely up to you now; it all depends on you. If you support my point of view, your country will be free and your city will become the leader of Greece. But if you side with those who are disinclined to fight, your reward will be the opposite of these benefits.’
[110] These words of Miltiades’ won Callimachus over to his side. With the War Archon’s support, the view that they ought to engage the enemy prevailed. Subsequently, when each of the commanders who had inclined towards engaging the enemy held the presidency of the board of commanders for the day, he stood down in favour of Miltiades. While accepting the post each time, Miltiades waited until the presidency was properly his before giving battle.
[111] So when it was his turn, the Athenians took up battle positions. The War Archon was in command of the right wing (in conformity with the custom in force in Athens at the time, that the right wing was to be commanded by the War Archon), then the tribes followed, one after another, in their usual order, and finally the Plataeans were positioned on the left wing. And ever since this battle, during the sacrificial rites at the public gatherings in the festival held every four years at Athens, the Athenian crier has prayed for prosperity not just for the Athenian people, but for the Plataeans as well. Anyway, the arrangement of the Athenian army at Marathon was such that it was extended over the same length as the Persian army. It was at its weakest in the centre, which was only a few ranks deep, but each of the two wings was at full strength.
[112] When their battle lines were drawn up and the omens from the sacrifices were favourable, the Athenians were released, and they charged the invaders at a run. The distance between the two armies was no less than eight stades. When the Persians saw the Athenians running towards them, they got ready to receive them, but they thought the Athenians must be mad—mad enough to bring about their utter destruction—because they could see how few of them there were, and that their charge was unsupported by either cavalry or archers. That was the invaders’ assessment of the situation, but when the Athenians came to grips with them all along the line, they fought remarkably well. They were the first Greeks known to charge enemy forces at a run, and the first to endure the sight of Persian dress and the men wearing it. Up until then even the word ‘Persian’ had been a source of fear in Greece.
[113] The fighting at Marathon was long and drawn out. In the centre, where the Greeks were faced with the Persians themselves and the Sacae, they were beaten; the invaders got the better of the Greeks at this point, broke through their lines, and pursued them inland. However, the Athenians and the Plataeans on their respective wings were victorious. They left the Persians they had routed to flee from the battlefield and concentrated on those who had broken through the centre. The two wings combined into a single fighting unit—and the Athenians won. They harried the retreating Persians and cut them down, until they reached the coast, where they called up fire and began to take over the ships.
[114] During this mêlée the War Archon was killed, fighting bravely, and one of the commanders, Stesilaus the son of Thrasylaus, died as well. It was also at this point that while Cynegeirus the son of Euphorion was grabbing hold of the stern of one of the ships he was fatally wounded when his hand was chopped off by a battleaxe. A number of other famous Athenians fell as well.
[115] The Athenians captured seven of the Persian ships in this way, but the invaders managed to put to sea with the rest of their fleet. They picked up the Eretrian prisoners from the island where they had left them and then set out to sail around Cape Sunium, with the intention of reaching the city of Athens before the Athenian forces could get there. In Athens the Alcmaeonidae were blamed for setting this strategy in motion by raising a shield as a prearranged signal to the Persians when they were out at sea.
[116] While the Persians were sailing around Sunium, the Athenians raced back as quickly as possible to defend the city, which they managed to reach before the Persians got there. On arriving they set up camp at the Heracleum in Cynosarges—thus exchanging one sanctuary of Heracles, the one in Marathon, for another. The invaders hove to off Phalerum, which was Athens’ naval harbour in those days, but then after riding at anchor there for a while they sailed back to Asia.
[117] The losses on either side at the battle of Marathon were as follows: about 6,400 Persian soldiers fell, while only 192 died on the Athenian side. An extraordinary thing happened there: while fighting bravely in the thick of the action an Athenian called Epizelus the son of Couphagoras lost his sight, even though he had not been wounded or struck by a missile anywhere on his body. And from that moment on, for the rest of his life, he was blind. I have it on hearsay that the story he used to tell about the incident was as follows: it seemed to him that he was confronted by a huge man in heavy armour, whose beard overshadowed his whole shield; but this phantom passed him by and killed the man next to him. That is Epizelus’ story, according to my informants.
[118] In the course of his voyage back to Asia with the Persian army Datis stopped on Myconos, and while he was there he had a dream. Precisely what he saw in the dream is not recorded, but early the next day he organized a search of the fleet, and a gilded image of Apollo was found in a Phoenician ship. Datis asked, and was told, which sanctuary the image had been stolen from. He then boarded his own ship and made his way to Delos, where he deposited the statue in the sanctuary, told the Delians (who had by then returned to the island) to take it to Delium, a place in Theban territory on the coast opposite Chalcis, and then left the island. The Delians, however, did not return the image, but twenty years later the Thebans fetched it of their own accord and took it to Delium, having been prompted to do so by an oracle.
[119] After landing in Asia, Datis and Artaphrenes took the enslaved Eretrians to Susa. Before their capture, King Darius had been furious with the Eretrians for having been the original aggressors, but he was satisfied with seeing them brought before him in their vanquished state and he did them no further harm. In fact, he settled them in Cissia, in one of his own staging-posts called Ardericca. Ardericca is 210 stades from Susa, and it is also forty stades away from a well which is a source of three different products: bitumen, salt, and oil are all extracted from it. The method used is as follows: water is drawn from it by means of a swipe, to which half a wineskin is attached rather than a bucket. They immerse the wineskin, draw water out with it, and pour it into a tank. The water is then drained into another container where it is diverted through three channels. The bitumen and the salt immediately harden, but the oil ⟨is collected in vessels⟩.† This oil, for which the Persian word is rhadinake, is black and unpleasant smelling. This is the place King Darius gave the Eretrians to live; they were still there in my day, but they have preserved their original language.
[120] So that is what happened to the Eretrians. After the full moon, a force of two thousand Lacedaemonians came to Athens; they were in such a hurry to be on time that they reached Attica two days after leaving Sparta. Although they were too late for the battle, they still very much wanted to see the Persians, so they went to survey the battlefield at Marathon. Afterwards, they expressed their admiration for the Athenians and their achievement, and then returned home.
[121] I find the story about the Alcmaeonidae too implausible to believe—as if they would ever have signalled the Persians by prior agreement with a shield, because they wanted Athens to be controlled by foreigners and Hippias! After all, they were obviously at least as disenchanted with tyranny as Callias (who was the son of Phaenippus and father of Hipponicus), if not even more so. Every time Pisistratus was banished from Athens, Callias was the only person in Athens who dared to buy any of his property when it was offered for sale by the public auctioneer, and that was not the only thing he did to express the depth of his loathing for him.†
[123] The Alcmaeonidae hated tyranny at least as much as Callias, and that is why I find the slander too implausible to accept. It is beyond belief that they could have signalled with the shield, seeing that they spent the whole era of the Athenian tyrants in exile, and were responsible for the Pisistratidae losing their tyranny—and so played a far greater part in winning Athens’ freedom than Harmodius and Aristogiton, in my opinion. After all, the assassination of Hipparchus by Harmodius and Aristogiton only served to enrage the surviving Pisistratidae, without checking their tyranny in the slightest. However, if it is really true that, as I explained earlier, the Alcmaeonidae were the ones who persuaded the Pythia to tell the Lacedaemonians to free Athens, it is obvious that they were the liberators of Athens.
[124] It might perhaps be thought, however, that they turned traitors because they had a grudge against the Athenian people. But no men in Athens were respected or admired more than they were, so it makes no sense to suggest that a shield was held up by them, at any rate, for any such reason. It is impossible to deny that a shield was used to make a signal, because that actually happened, but I can add nothing beyond what I have already said on the matter of who the signaller was.
[125] Although the Alcmaeonidae were a distinguished family in Athens in earlier generations too, from the time of Alcmaeon and then again from the time of Megacles they gained particular prestige. First, Alcmaeon the son of Megacles made himself very useful to the Lydians who were sent by Croesus from Sardis to the Delphic oracle and did everything he could to help them. When the Lydians who had visited the oracle told Croesus how Alcmaeon had furthered his cause, Croesus invited him to come to Sardis and when he was there he offered him as much gold as he could carry away on his person at one time. Alcmaeon considered the nature of this offer and then put a plan into effect: before being taken to the treasury he dressed himself in a large tunic with enough spare material for a deep fold, and put on the biggest pair of boots he could find. In the treasury he fell on a heap of gold-dust. First he stuffed down around his shins as much gold as the boots could take, then he filled the fold of his tunic with gold, sprinkled his hair with the dust, put even more in his mouth, and left the treasury. He could scarcely drag his feet along in their boots, and with his bulging cheeks and extra bulk all over he hardly looked like a human being at all. When Croesus saw him he burst out laughing and gave him not only all the gold he was already carrying, but the same amount again. That is how Alcmaeon’s house became extremely wealthy. Alcmaeon could now afford to maintain a fourhorse chariot, which he rode to victory at Olympia.
[126] Next, a generation later, Cleisthenes the tyrant of Sicyon elevated the house even further, so that it became far more famous in Greece than it was before. What happened was that Cleisthenes (who was the son of Aristonymus, grandson of Myron and great grandson of Andreas) had a daughter called Agariste, and he wanted to find her the best man in Greece to be her husband. So during the Olympic Games (at which he won in the four-horsechariot race) he had the criers make the following announcement: ‘Any man in Greece who considers himself good enough to become Cleisthenes’ son-in-law should come to Sicyon in sixty days’ time or sooner, because Cleisthenes will come to a decision about his daughter’s marriage within a year, starting from that date.’ So all the Greeks who regarded themselves or their country with pride started going to Sicyon to present themselves as prospective husbands for his daughter, and Cleisthenes had a race-track and a wrestling-ground specially made for them.
[127] From Sybaris in Italy came Smindyrides the son of Hippocrates. Sybaris was at the time at the height of its prosperity, and Smindyrides’ lifestyle had reached unsurpassed heights of soft-living luxury. Also from Italy came Damasus of Siris, the son of Amyris the Wise, as he was known. The Ionian Gulf was represented as well: Amphimnestus the son of Epistrophus came from Epidamnus on the Ionian Gulf. From Aetolia came Males, whose brother, Titormus, was the strongest man in Greece, but went to live in the remotest parts of Aetolia to avoid other people. From the Peloponnese came Leocedes the son of the tyrant of Argos, Phidon. It was Phidon who introduced a system of weights and measures into the Peloponnese and whose arrogance was unsurpassed in Greece, in that he ousted the Elean organizers of the Olympic Games and usurped that role for himself. The Peloponnese was also represented by an Arcadian from Trapezus called Amiantus the son of Lycurgus, an Azanian from Paeus called Laphanes the son of Euphorion (it was this Euphorion, according to the tale told in Arcadia, who received the Dioscuri into his house and from then on never turned anyone away), and by an Elean called Onomastus the son of Aegaeus. These men came from the actual Peloponnese, and then from Athens came Megacles the son of Alcmaeon (the one who had visited Croesus) and also Hippoclides the son of Tisander, the most outstanding man in Athens for his wealth and good looks. Lysanias came from Eretria, which was then a prosperous city, but he was the only one to come from Euboea. From Thessaly came one of the Scopadae, Diactorides of Crannon, and the Molossians were represented by Alcon.
[128] All these men came as suitors. On the appointed day, Cleisthenes began by finding out where they were from and what each individual’s lineage was. Then he kept them with him for a year, while he tested their courage, character, education, and manners by spending time with each of them on their own and with all of them at once. He would take the younger ones out to the gymnasia, but the most important tests used to take place when they met together to eat. For as well as treating them in all the ways mentioned, he also entertained them lavishly throughout the period of their stay with him. Now, as it happened, of all the suitors it was the visitors from Athens who pleased him most, and of the two Athenians he had a preference for Hippoclides the son of Tisander, because of his courage and because he was related by his ancestry to the Cypselidae of Corinth.
[129] On the day appointed for the marriage ceremony—the day when Cleisthenes had promised he would make known which one of the suitors he preferred—he sacrificed a hundred cattle and held a feast not just for the suitors themselves, but for the whole city of Sicyon. After the meal, the suitors competed with one another at singing and at public speaking. As the drinking progressed, Hippoclides had a clear lead over the others, but then he told the pipe-player to strike up a tune, and when the musician did so he began to dance. Now, although Hippoclides liked his own dancing a lot, Cleisthenes was beginning to look on the whole business askance. After a while, Hippoclides stopped momentarily and asked for a table to be brought in. When the table arrived there, he first danced a Laconian dance on it, then some Attic figures, and finally stood on his head on the table and waggled his feet around. Hippoclides’ uninhibited dancing of the first and second sets of figures had already put Cleisthenes off having him as a son-in-law, but he kept silent because he did not want to scold him. When he saw him waggling his legs around, however, he could no longer restrain himself. ‘Son of Tisander,’ he said, ‘you have danced away your marriage.’ The young man replied, ‘Hippoclides doesn’t care!’—and that is how the proverb arose.
[130] Cleisthenes called for silence and addressed them all as follows: ‘Gentlemen, you have come as suitors to try to win my daughter in marriage. I am full of admiration for all of you. If only it were possible for me to gratify you all, instead of having to pick just one of you and reject the rest. But it is of course impossible for me to please all of you, since my plans concern just the one young woman. To each of those whose suit is unsuccessful, I will give a talent of silver in acknowledgement of the honour you have done me in wishing to marry into my family and to recompense you for your absence from home. But I hereby betroth my daughter Agariste to Megacles the son of Alcmaeon, as Athenian custom demands.’ Megacles accepted, and the marriage was ratified by Cleisthenes.
[131] So much for the assessment of the suitors, which spread the reputation of the Alcmaeonidae throughout Greece. The marriage of Megacles and Agariste produced the Cleisthenes who fixed the tribes and established democracy at Athens. He was named after his mother’s father, the tyrant of Sicyon. As well as Cleisthenes, Megacles also had a son called Hippocrates, who became the father of another Megacles and another Agariste, named after Cleisthenes’ daughter. This Agariste, the daughter of Hippocrates, married Xanthippus the son of Ariphron. When she was pregnant she dreamt she gave birth to a lion, and then a few days later she bore Xanthippus a son, Pericles.
[132] After the defeat of the Persians at Marathon, Miltiades’ already high reputation in Athens was raised even further. So when he asked the Athenians for seventy ships, an army, and funds, without supporting his request by telling them which country he was planning to attack—in fact, without telling them anything except that they would get rich if they followed him, because he would take them to a country where there was gold in abundance to be had—the Athenians enthusiastically let him have them.
[133] With the forces he was given, Miltiades sailed against Paros. Ostensibly, the strike was in retaliation for Parian aggression in sending a trireme to Marathon in support of the Persian forces. But this was no more than an excuse; in fact he held a grudge against the Parians because one of their number, Lysagoras the son of Tisias, had turned Hydarnes the Persian against him. Having arrived at his destination Miltiades pinned the Parians inside their town walls and proceeded to besiege them there with his troops. After a while he sent in a herald with a demand for a hundred talents, accompanied by the threat that, if they failed to pay up, he would keep his men there until the city had fallen. But the Parians had not the slightest intention of giving Miltiades any money; in fact, they started to work on ways of ensuring the town’s safety. Among other plans, they built up any particularly vulnerable parts of the wall under cover of darkness to double their original height.
[134] Up to this point in the story, all the Greek sources agree. As for subsequent events, what follows is the Parian version. Miltiades, they say, did not know what to do. A female prisoner of war of his called Timo asked for a meeting with him; she was a native Parian, and was the under-priestess of the chthonian deities. When she and Miltiades met, she advised him to do what she suggested, if he really wanted to take Paros. She put forward her proposal, whereupon he made his way to the hill in front of the town, jumped over the fence around the sanctuary of Demeter the Lawgiver, since he could not open the door, and then went to the temple to do whatever it was that he was there for. His intention might have been to interfere with objects which are not supposed to be touched, or something else. When he reached the entrance to the shrine, however, he was suddenly overcome with terror, so he retraced his steps. But as he jumped down from the wall, he wrenched his thigh (or struck his knee, as others say).
[135] So Miltiades sailed back to Athens in a sorry state, without bringing any money for Athens and without having annexed Paros; all he had done was besiege the town for twenty-six days and lay waste to the island. When the Parians found out that their under-priestess Timo had given advice to Miltiades, they wanted to punish her for it. They waited until things had settled down after the siege and then sent emissaries to Delphi to ask whether they should put the under-priestess of the gods to death for having told hostile forces how to bring about the downfall of her country and for revealing to Miltiades matters which men were forbidden to know. The Pythia, however, told them that Timo was not guilty and therefore not to be killed; she explained that since it was fated that Miltiades would die a horrible death, Timo had appeared to him to lure him into evil ways. That was the Pythia’s response to the Parians’ question.
[136] Following Miltiades’ return from Paros, the Athenians began to malign him. His most active detractor was Xanthippus the son of Ariphron, who had him up before the people on the charge, which carried the penalty of death, of having deceived the Athenians. Although Miltiades was present in court, the necrosis of his thigh prevented him from delivering his own defence speech. Instead, his friends spoke in his defence, while he lay there on a litter; they reminded the court at considerable length of the battle of Marathon and how Miltiades had captured Lemnos, made the Pelasgians pay for their crimes, and handed over the island to the Athenians. The Athenian people came down on his side in so far as they exonerated him from the death penalty, but they fined him fifty talents for the wrong he had done them. Afterwards, Miltiades died from the putrefaction and necrosis of his thigh, and his son Cimon paid the fifty talents.
[137] Here is how Miltiades the son of Cimon came to gain control of Lemnos. At one time, the Pelasgians were driven out of Attica by the Athenians. I am not in a position to comment on the justice or injustice of the act; all I can do is report what is said. Hecataeus the son of Hegesander, in his account of the episode, says that it was not justified. According to him, what happened was that the Athenians cast covetous eyes on the land under Mount Hymettus which they themselves had given the Pelasgians to live in, as a reward for having once built the defensive wall around the Acropolis. Previously, this land had been so poor as to be worthless, but according to Hecataeus, when the Athenians saw how well farmed it had become, they were seized with envy and wanted to possess it, so they expelled the Pelasgians without having any real reason for doing so.
The Athenians, however, claim that the expulsion was justified. They say that the Pelasgians were using their homeland under Hymettus as a base for criminal activities. For instance, in those days the Athenians had no house-slaves (just as no one else in Greece did either), so their own sons and daughters† used to go to fetch water at Nine Springs, but whenever they did so the Pelasgians would assault them—and, not satisfied with this behaviour, they were also caught in the act of plotting to launch an attack against Athens. The Athenian account goes on to point out how much more moral they proved themselves to be, in that although they could have killed the Pelasgians, having discovered their plot, they refused to do so, but told them to leave the country instead. So the Pelasgians left and occupied various places, including Lemnos. These are the two versions, then, the first from Hecataeus, the second from the Athenians.
[138] The Pelasgians who were living on Lemnos at the time in question wanted to pay the Athenians back. They were well aware of the dates of the Athenian holidays, so they got hold of some penteconters and sailed to Brauron, where they ambushed the Athenian women celebrating the festival of Artemis. They abducted a number of women and sailed back to Lemnos, where they kept them as their concubines. Now, these women proved very fertile, and they taught all the children they produced the Attic dialect and Athenian customs. These children would have nothing to do with the children of Pelasgian women, and they always helped one another out; for instance, if an Athenian boy was hit by a Pelasgian child, all the other Athenian boys used to come to help him. Moreover, the Athenian boys took it upon themselves to wield power over the other children and were easily the dominant group. When the Pelasgians found out about this, they tried to decide what to do. As they thought about the situation, a very disturbing question crept into their minds: if these children had determined to support one another against the children of their legitimate wives and were already trying to gain the upper hand over the others, what would they do when they were actually grown up? The Pelasgians decided, then, that their best course was to kill the children of the Athenian women, which is exactly what they did; they murdered the children’s mothers too. This is one of the origins of the universal Greek practice of describing savage deeds as ‘Lemnian’. The other exploit which gave rise to this usage took place earlier; it was the murder by the Lemnian women of Thoas and their husbands.
[139] Following the murder by the Pelasgians of their own children and the women, the land became barren and both the human and animal birthrate declined. Faced with the grim prospect of starvation and childlessness, the Pelasgians sent to Delphi to ask how they could obtain relief from their current wretched state. The Pythia told them they had to submit to any punishment the Athenians decided to impose on them. So the Pelasgians went to Athens and expressed their intention of making complete amends for their crime. The Athenians placed in the town hall a couch adorned with the finest available coverings and set beside it a table laden with everything that is good to eat, and told the Pelasgians to hand over their country to them in a similar condition. In response the Pelasgians said, ‘When a ship makes the crossing from your land to ours in a single day on the north wind, then we will give you our country.’ They were sure that this was impossible, because Attica is well south of Lemnos.
[140] That was the end of the matter at the time, but many years later, when the Hellespontine Chersonese was in Athenian hands, Miltiades the son of Cimon took advantage of the prevailing Etesian winds to sail from Elaeus in the Chersonese to Lemnos. He reminded the Pelasgians of the oracle, which they had never expected to see fulfilled, and ordered them off the island. The people of Hephaestia obeyed his command, but the people of Myrina refused to accept that the Chersonese was Attic territory. The Athenians then blockaded them into submission. That is how the Athenians, under Miltiades, came to gain control of Lemnos.