499 BC. Winter in Lacedaemon. Just offshore from Gythion, the small port which served the Spartans as their naval base, the islet of Cranae was windswept and deserted; and yet it bore, for all who gazed at it, indelible associations of summer heat and blazing stars. There it was, beneath the open sky, that Helen and Paris had spent their first night together, an entwined delirium of passion that had led, in short time, to a conflagration engulfing both East and West, and Spartan warships plowing the waters off Troy. A promising omen? Aristagoras, gazing at the notorious island as his ship pulled into Gythion, would certainly have hoped so. His mission was nothing less than to recruit the Spartans to a second great Asian war.
Taking the thirty-mile road that led to their city, Aristagoras rehearsed the incentives that he would dangle before his hosts. The Persians were rich beyond the dreams of avarice; they were perfumed and effeminate; why, “they even fought in trousers.”14 Could any foe be more tempting? Particularly since the Spartans had, in one of their kings, a leader with a proven relish for launching preemptive strikes. Cleomenes, even after the debacle at Eleusis, still stood unchallenged as the strongman of Sparta. Demaratus, the colleague whose agitation had done so much to abort the Athenian campaign, had been decisively shoved back in his place. Returning from Attica, Cleomenes had openly accused his fellow monarch of sabotaging the war effort, and pressured the Spartan assembly to pass a law forbidding both kings ever again to go on the same campaign. His rival was effectively confined to barracks. Indeed, the wretched Demaratus was left so thoroughly in the shade that he had been reduced to the desperate straits of entering a chariot at the Olympic Games; worse, when he won he had actually boasted about his victory. If this was vulgar behavior for any Spartan, it was unheard of for a king.
But Cleomenes, too, still bore scars from the Athenian misadventure. When he met Aristagoras to discuss the crisis in Ionia, the Spartan commander-in-chief astonished his guest by flatly turning down his appeal for aid. Assuming that he was being stung for a bribe, Aristagoras followed Cleomenes home, proffering ever higher figures as he did so. Not even the presence of the king’s eight-year-old daughter, Gorgo, served to inhibit him—a major oversight, in view of the priggishness conditioned from a tender age into Spartan girls. “Daddy,” the bright-eyed Gorgo piped up suddenly, “this foreigner is out to corrupt you. Leave him well alone!”15 A display of precocious rectitude to thrill her father’s heart; but Cleomenes, even had his daughter not been there to hold him to the straight and narrow, would surely still have sent Aristagoras packing. The taste of the Athenian debacle was still too bitter in his mouth. Worse, there were reports from the north that the Argives, the old enemy, were regrouping, plotting yet another showdown. The Spartans would need all their reserves of manpower to deal with the looming crisis. Cleomenes had not the slightest intention of diverting a single hoplite overseas.
Which is not to say that he was contemptuous of the Persian threat. By now a seasoned strategist, Cleomenes could certainly recognize a threat to Sparta in the growing scale of the Great King’s ambitions. But not to Sparta alone—nor even preeminently. Watching the disconsolate Aristagoras leave Lacedaemon, Cleomenes would have had a shrewd idea as to his next port of call. The Ionians, that winter, were not the only rebels against the Great King. A city of them was to be found in Greece, too. The Athenians, having sought Persian assistance against Cleomenes back in 507 BC, had come bitterly to regret their gift of earth and water. In what Cleomenes himself could only regard as the most exquisite poetic justice, Artaphernes, that instinctive tyrant-sponsor, had ordered the Athenians to take back Hippias, the exiled Pisistratid. The Athenians, naturally, had refused. As a result, from that moment on, to all intents and purposes they had been at war with Persia. Who was Cleomenes, of all people, to bail out the Athenians? Their mess: their problem. And when, as he was sure they would, they answered Aristagoras’ appeal by sending a task force to Ionia, they would be running risks, and suffering casualties, and probing the Persians’ strength as proxies of Spartan intelligence.
A fact of which the more calculating of the Athenians were uncomfortably aware. Wise heads among the aristocracy, alert to the vastness of Persian power and practiced in realpolitik, listened to Aristagoras and his war-mongering with horror; but it was not the aristocracy who ruled the Assembly now. The Athenian people, eager to pay back Artaphernes for ever having received their submission, buoyed by the idea of making cause with their kinsmen across the sea, and intoxicated by the prospect of easy loot, voted enthusiastically to send a fleet of twenty ships to join the assault on Persia. War fever, as Aristagoras jovially pointed out, was an intoxication to which democracies appeared peculiarly prone. After all, “where he had failed with Cleomenes, a single individual, he had now succeeded with the Athenians, an assembly of thirty thousand.”16
Unfortunate for him, then, and for the Ionians, that there were no other democracies on hand. Indeed, aside from Eretria, a merchant port on the island of Euboea which had long felt its interests threatened by Persia, Athens was the only city in the whole of Greece to swallow Aristagoras’ patter. But this sobering statistic, far from giving her citizens pause for thought, served only to fuel their already shining sense of exceptionalism and mission. In the spring of 498 BC, democracy’s first ever task force duly slid out of the harbor of Phalerum. Heading eastward along the Attic coastline, it was soon joined from the north by five ships from Eretria, and then, prows pointed boldly toward Ionia, sailed onward and out of the Athenians’ sight. Not out of mind, however. Wherever the Athenian people gathered together that early summer, whether in the bars of the Ceramicus, in the Agora or down in Phalerum, news was feverishly awaited. Weeks passed. Then, at last, news began to filter through. The soldiers of the democracy were reported to have scored a glorious success. Disdaining to cower and skulk on the Ionian coast, they had dared instead to strike directly at the heart of Artaphernes’ power. Marching with their Ionian and Eretrian allies over the mountains that guarded Sardis, they had followed secret, winding paths, and then, taking the Persians wholly by surprise, had descended suddenly into the plain. Artaphernes had been sent scampering into his palace. The lower city had been burned. A Persian expedition against Miletus had been forced to turn round. Athens had done her duty; and the Ionians, thanks to her heroic efforts, had surely now been freed for good.
Mission accomplished? So it might have seemed. It did not take long, however, for the sunny news from Ionia to darken. Yes, Artaphernes had holed up in his palace; but the Greeks, few in number and lacking siege engines, had failed miserably to breach its formidable walls. Nor, with fire blazing through the lower town, had they been able to preserve the temple of Cybele from the inferno. This sacrilege was so fearful that the Greeks, already dispirited by their failure to capture Artaphernes, had promptly retreated to the mountains. Stumbling wearily back to the sea, they had then found themselves shadowed by squads of Persian horsemen. Barely a mile from their ships, they had been forced to turn and make a stand. “Easily beatable”:17 this was how Aristagoras had repeatedly described the Persians during the course of his shuttle diplomacy. Now, wilting beneath a hail of their arrows, choking on dust clouds raised by their tireless cavalry, the Athenians had discovered the baneful truth. The Greek line, bronze-clad though it was, had begun to break. The Eretrian commander, struggling to hold it together, had been killed. The Athenian survivors, separated from the main body of the Greek army, had straggled back to their ships, hoisted their sails and fled.
Greeting the return of the broken fleet with alarmed perplexity, their fellow citizens could at last appreciate that Aristagoras had fed them a con. The Ionian’s claim that the Persians were womanish and feeble stood exposed as the product of wishful thinking. The Athenian Assembly, veering wildly from jingoism to funk, dismissed all further appeals from the war zone, frantic though these were, and bitter with reproach. Indeed, having originally sold Athens a false prospectus, Aristagoras could now point to some genuine successes; for the burning of Sardis, although it had struck the Athenians as a disaster, had blazed the news of Persian humiliation far and wide. From Cyprus to the Chersonese, the sparks of rebellion were bursting into flames, and Artaphernes, his prestige badly damaged, was finding the task of stamping them out a desperate one.
The Athenians, however, with the obduracy of born-again isolationists, remained resolutely unimpressed. It appeared clear to them now, from the brief glimpse of Persian power that their expedition had afforded, that all Aristagoras’ schemes and ambitions were merely so many castles built of air. Most ominously, as they had found out for themselves, the Ionian hoplites simply had no answer to the range and speed of the Persian cavalry—so much so that by the summer of 497 BC, barely two years into the revolt, the rebels had all but been swept into the sea. Only Miletus, birthplace of the insurgency, still held out; and although the Ionian fleet remained unconquered, there were no supplies or fresh recruits to be had from the waves. So grim did the situation appear that Aristagoras, despairing of the Athenians, decided to take a leaf out of his uncle’s book and travel to Myrcinus, Histiaeus’ private fiefdom in Thrace, to secure fresh timber for the fleet and silver for mercenaries. The natives, however, proved even less supportive of the war effort than the Athenians had been: far from welcoming their landlord, they opted instead to make their own bid for freedom, and knifed him dead. So, squalidly and obscurely, perished Aristagoras, instigator of the great revolt against the King of Kings—and the one man to have provided it with genuine leadership and purpose.
The Ionians’ hope of victory, already flickering, now began to dim to the point of near-extinction. It would take the Persians, laboring hard to rebuild the fleet stolen from them at the beginning of the revolt, another three years before they felt ready to challenge the rebels for control of the sea. Yet, during that time, with Aristagoras dead, and no one stepping forward to replace him, the Ionians’ war effort appeared struck by paralysis, as though with horror at the catastrophe they knew was surely nearing. Faction leader turned against faction leader; class against class; city against city. More lethal in its effects than any number of cavalry squadrons, Persian gold began to do its work. Defeatists and appeasers flaked away. Still the Ionian fleet, moored along the islands off embattled Miletus, held to its position, more than 350 battleships, a fearsome number, save that as they rotted in the storms of winter and steamed in the summer heat they began to reek of dread and desperation, a stench that hung menacingly in the air, and reached as far as a fretful Athens.
For there, with the dual realizations that any bulwark the Ionians might have given them was surely doomed, and that the far-seeing and pitiless eye of the King of Kings would soon be fixed unblinkingly on their city, the Athenians were panicking, too. The ebullient self-confidence that had swept the democracy to its first intoxicating victories was already fading fast. Defeat in Ionia was not the only bloody nose that the Athenians had recently been given. For a whole decade now, they had found themselves embroiled in a bothersome war with the small but tormentingly energetic island of Aegina, a nest, as the Athenians saw it, of pirates and scavengers, and one that stood infuriatingly only fifteen miles south of Salamis, in the heart of the Saronic Gulf—directly astride their shipping lanes. Guided in her policy as she was by landowners, instinctive lubbers with their roots in the soil, Athens had never thought to build herself a navy. Nor, despite the relentless buzzing of Aeginetan privateers, did she think to do so now. Who, after all, was going to stump up the cash? Not the poor, self-evidently; and certainly not the rich, who took it for granted that they should stand and fight with shield and spear on dry land, as men of their background, men who could afford decent armor, had always done. Yet this disdain for seapower, although it certainly helped to preserve the hoplite class from the indignity of having to grunt and sweat at an oar, did not contribute greatly to the war effort against Aegina. Indeed, such was the Athenians’ impotence against enemy raids that they were forced, on one occasion, to watch helplessly as their whole harbor went up in flames. True, the wide bay of Phalerum was not easily defended; nor were the Aeginetan pirates in any position to challenge Athens by land; but the fact that the war was a nuisance rather than a terminal menace in no way diminished the democracy’s sudden sense of drift. One question, in particular, could hardly fail to trouble the voters. If they found it impossible to defeat a tiny pinprick of an island just off their coast, what hope would they have against the righteous fury of a superpower?
As the storm clouds of seeming Persian invincibility loomed ever darker over Ionia, so strange shadows from the past returned to haunt Athens, too. In the summer of 496 BC, the Athenian people elected as their head of state a man whose very name appeared to hint at an imminent climbdown from liberty. Hipparchus was not merely the son of a prominent Pisistratid minister, but had even married his sister to Hippias, the exiled tyrant. The ideal candidate, perhaps, to open channels to his brother-in-law, negotiate favorable terms with Artaphernes, and secure a pardon for the burning of Sardis from the Great King. In the event, the democracy stood firm: despite all the continuing bad news from the Ionian front, Hipparchus served out his year of office without engaging in active collaboration. Yet the temptations of surrender, which the peace party naturally preferred to term realism, continued to gnaw away. Rumors of treachery—of “medizing”—swirled through the city; and inevitably, as they had done for a century, the darkest suspicions of all attached themselves to those champion opportunists, the Alcmaeonids. Cleisthenes may have been the patron of democracy, but few doubted that his clan, given sufficient incentive, would opt to sell it out. That nothing was ever proved against them served only to fuel the democracy’s paranoia. The Great King’s gold was surely flowing somewhere, somehow, into Athens. If not to an Alcmaeonid, then to somebody else. Politician kept suspicious eye on politician, tracked the news from Ionia with growing foreboding, and maneuvered for advantage.
To the Eupatrids, of course, this was an old game. Appeasement came naturally to them. As in Ionia, so in Athens, the aristocracy had long affected a faddish Orientalism. The notion that they should risk the obliteration of their city rather than arrive at an accommodation with the all-powerful King of Kings was hardly one that they could be expected to embrace. Enthusiasts for the new political order, realizing this and marking the pall of black smoke that hung over Ionia, came increasingly to mistrust the old elite and to doubt their loyalties. Admittedly, not all Eupatrids could necessarily be regarded as collaborators in waiting: Miltiades, for instance, grandest of the grand though he was, had been an active freedom-fighter in the Chersonese since the very start of the Ionians’ great revolt. But even he ruled his fiefdom as a tyrant: not much of a recommendation to those in Athens growing nervous for their democracy.
Where, then, could they look for leadership? Perhaps to a new generation of politician, and a new breed. One not unsettled by the talk of people power, as the scions of the great families were, but inspired by it instead. Revolution, so alarming to the Eupatrid elite, appeared to promise rare opportunities to talented citizens on the make. Barely a decade into the life of the democracy, for instance, a young man by the name of Themistocles could credibly set his eyes on the supreme office in Athens, the archonship, despite coming from a family with no obvious political pedigree at all. Though of aristocratic birth, his father had never shown the slightest interest in holding public office; his mother—horror of horrors—was not even Athenian-born. In an earlier and more chauvinistic age, a misfortune of this order would have been sufficient to deny Themistocles his citizenship altogether; only Cleisthenes’ reforms and the need to pad out the ten tribes with a full complement of able bodies had ensured a change to the law. As a result, Themistocles’ sense of loyalty toward the new order was of a peculiarly personal nature—and left him hankering after public office rather as a man in a delirium might crave a cure. Themistocles had recognized, with the instinctive cynicism that would always mark his love affair with celebrity, that in a state run by the people there could be only one certain gauge of fame. “How can you rate me,” he would ask his friends, “when I have not yet made anyone jealous?”18 The horizons opened up by the new order glimmered before him as a kind of agony.
In 494 BC, this brilliant and ambitious young man celebrated his thirtieth birthday—and became old enough, after years of waiting, to stand for election to the archonship. The following year, he resolved, he would have a go at it—and do so, furthermore, with a good chance of success. He might have been inexperienced in public life and of obscure background, but he nevertheless had all the makings of a star. Bull-necked, crop-haired, solid of body and face, Themistocles had the appearance, so posterity would judge, “of a true hero”:19 one indomitable, indestructible, packed with strength. Yet he was simultaneously, in his intelligence, the very opposite of muscle-bound: the workings of his mind, infinitely mobile and serpentine, would ultimately become a thing of wonder to his fellow citizens—and of alarm. Not a dark art required of the politician under the Athenians’ new form of government but Themistocles showed himself its master: he could infight, he could network, he could spin. Above all, and most crucially, he knew how to make himself visible. Rather than live out on the family estates, for instance, he chose to settle instead downwind of the Ceramicus, near the “Hangman’s Gate,” where the bodies of executed criminals and suicides were dumped: an insalubrious address, to be sure, but also—and here was the attraction for Themistocles— within walking distance of the Agora. Concerned not to have the great and the good put off visiting this ill-omened spot, he began inviting celebrated musicians to rehearse inside his home; keen to make friends and influence people, he set up as an attorney, the first candidate ever in a democracy to rehearse for public life by practicing the law. Above all, naturally affable and gregarious as he was, he wooed the poor; and they, not used to being courted, duly loved him back. Touring the taverns, the markets, the docks, canvassing where no politician had ever thought to canvass before, making sure never to forget a single voter’s name, Themistocles had set his eyes on a radically new constituency.
Not that ambition was his only motivation. While nothing that Themistocles did was ever entirely divorced from self-interest, he had seen in the poor not merely voters but the future saving of his city. A startling notion to his peers; “yet it was the genius of Themistocles that he could gaze far into the future, and penetrate there every possibility, both for evil and for good.”20 More clearly than any of his elders, the tyro politician recognized that the best chance for his city’s survival lay not on dry land but on the sea—and that any warship would depend for power upon the massed muscle of its rowers. This was hardly a convincing prognosis, it might have been thought, when Athens possessed barely a harbor, let alone a battle fleet. Themistocles, however, his gaze fixed in visionary fashion upon the long term, was undaunted. Drawing up his manifesto, he began to argue for the urgent downgrading of the existing docks and their replacement by a new port at Piraeus, the rocky headland that lay just beyond Phalerum beach. The shoreline there afforded not one but three natural harbors, enough for any fleet, and readily fortifiable. True, it lay two miles further from the city than Phalerum, but Themistocles argued passionately that this was a small price to pay for the immense advantages that a new harbor at Piraeus would afford: a safe port for the Athenians’ ever-expanding merchant fleet; a trading hub to rival Corinth and Aegina; immunity from Aeginetan privateers. And perhaps, in due course, if the money could be found and the circumstances appeared to demand it, then perhaps, just perhaps, a naval base as well…
Themistocles, who had no wish to alarm the landed gentry with wild talk of sea power, chose not to belabor this final point. Yet its shadow, in that spring of 494 BC, was palpable across Athens. The news from the East was darkening daily. The Persian war fleet was finally on the move. The Ionian leaders, it was reported, smuggling themselves ashore onto the spur of Mount Mycale, then skulking up its side like refugees in their own land, had assembled at the Panionium, their long-abandoned communal shrine. There, clearing away the weeds, they had resolved to make their stand against the Persians, and stake their future on a single, desperate throw. The revolt, as its leaders were agonizedly aware, was now on a razor’s edge: “On one side, freedom— on the other slavery, and the slavery of runaways, at that.”21 No choice had been left the Ionians but to man every warship that they could, to throw in their every last reserve. Round the cape of Mycale they had sailed, south toward Miletus and the small island of Lade. There, two miles outside the great city’s harbors, they had made their base. Beyond them were six hundred enemy warships—and the prospect of a decisive battle. Yet, for days, as though overwhelmed by the monstrous scale of the looming engagement, neither side had ventured to stir; and nerves, across Ionia, across Athens, across the whole Greek world, began to jangle. Still the stalemate continued; and still, on harbor fronts everywhere, men waited anxiously for the news.
Then, toward summer, tidings at last, as bleak and flame-lit as had always been dreaded. The Ionians, starving on their tiny island base, had proved easy prey for enemy agents. When their fleet, advancing to meet a sudden Persian attack, had sailed out into the bay of Miletus, its line of battle had promptly crumbled. Some captains from Samos, the island facing Cape Mycale, had cut a private deal with the Persians, not merely to save their own skins but to doom the city in whose commercial shadow they had lived for so long. As whole squadrons copied the renegades’ example and began turning tail, defeat for the rest of the Ionian fleet had become inevitable—and the position of Miletus untenable. With corpses washing up in their harbors, disease rife in their streets, and all hopes of victory now lost in the waters off Lade, the Milesians had soon succumbed to the assault of the Persian siege engines; and Artaphernes, taking possession of the city, had wreaked upon it a terrible, almost Assyrian, revenge. The jewel of the Aegean, once the favored ally of the Persian king, had been given over completely to fire. Her men had been slaughtered, her women raped, her sons castrated, her daughters enslaved. As the wretched survivors, tethered in the train of wagons piled high with the treasures of their holiest shrines, began shuffling off on their long journey to the work camps and harems of Persia, they had passed settlers heading the other way, loyalists granted possession of their land by Artaphernes. Such was the fate that the Great King had sworn would befall all rebels against his power; and as the Great King had sworn, so, sure enough, it had come to pass.
Where next would he fix his gaze? Did the shadow of his anger have any limits? If news of the obliteration of Miletus was greeted in Athens and Eretria by naked terror, there ran through their neighbors, too, a palpable shudder of apprehension. Preoccupied with their own squabbles as they always had been, even the most parochial Greek cities were now obliged to lift their gaze and recognize in Persian power a new and prodigious factor in their calculations. But to what effect? There were many options open—and not all of them glorious. The Argives, for instance, whose enthusiasm for liberty ran a very distant second to their loathing of the Spartans, had made up their minds even before the fall of Miletus.22 Flourishing one of the bogus genealogies that had long been a feature of their foreign policy, Argive ambassadors had crossed to Sardis and informed the startled Persians that they were in fact descended—roll of drums—from an ancient king of Argos. A somewhat far-fetched theory, it might have been thought; except that the putative ancestor dredged up by the Argives, a gorgon-slaying, princess-rescuing hero by the name of Perseus, certainly sounded as though he might have been an ancestor of the Persians. A murky compact had duly followed, for Persians and Argives alike had excellent reasons for indulging the fantasy that they were relations: the former could anticipate a welcome base in the Peloponnese; the latter could rub their hands and dream of a Sparta reduced to rubble by their distant cousin, the King of Kings.
The Spartans themselves, despite a hostility to Persia that dated back to their rebuff at the hands of Cyrus, had long been content to regard Argive pretensions of kinship with the barbarians as pathetic rather than menacing. That quickly changed, however, as the grim news from Ionia began to arrive. A victorious Persia, a revanchist Argos: here was a prospect risen from the Spartans’ darkest nightmares. Cleomenes, having originally spurned the chance to fight the barbarians in Ionia, now looked to strike at them in a manner far more calculated to bring a glow to his countrymen’s hearts: by assaulting Argos. In the summer of 494 BC, even as the Persians were pulverizing the rebel forces in Ionia, Cleomenes duly led his countrymen northward on their own mission of annihilation. Nothing was permitted to stand in their way. Informed by his seers that an Argive river god would doom the Spartans if they crossed his waters, Cleomenes snorted, “How very patriotic of him,”23 and disdainfully took another route. Next, having shattered the Argive army in a great battle beside the village of Sepeia and pursued the survivors to a sacred grove, he called out to individual Argives that their ransom money had been paid. As they emerged from the sanctuary, Cleomenes had them executed one by one. When the remaining fugitives finally understood this murderous trick, Cleomenes coolly ordered the incineration of the holy grove.
A shocking crime, of course—as shocking, in its way, because ordered by a Greek, as the harrowing of Miletus. Even though Cleomenes, to spare himself the taint of sacrilege, had ordered helots to fire the grove, the black smoke that billowed up from the holocaust, greasy and polluted with human flesh, provided a gruesome statement to other cities of Spartan intent. No threat to Lacedaemon would be tolerated. Argos, culled of an entire generation, dismembered of her territory, left so enfeebled that even tiny Mycenae was able to wriggle free of her grip, stood as a mutilated example of what might result from any challenge to Spartan power. The Persians too could count themselves included in the warning. Any invasion would be met with implacable resistance. Sparta was pledged to hold her ground and fight, no matter what.
It seemed, then, as though Athens might not have to stand alone against the vengeful King of Kings after all. Yet the Athenians themselves, by the winter of 494 BC, appeared paralyzed by that same indecision which had so fatally afflicted their Ionian cousins. Perhaps they were numbed by the continuing bleakness of the news from across the Aegean. Ionia, once so prosperous, so brilliant, so fair, was reported to have become a wasteland. Weeds rose in the footsteps of the Persian reprisal squads; fugitives who had taken to the hills were being harried by dogs and human dragnets; those few Milesians not to have been deported sat shivering amid the blackened ruins of the birthplace of philosophy. The prospect that they might share a similar fate was almost too much for the Athenians to bear. In the spring of 493 BC, when a tragedy was staged at the City Dionysia that drew not on a scene from mythology, as the audience had been expecting, but directly on the fall of Miletus, “everyone in the theatre was moved to tears.”24 The tragedy was promptly banned and the playwright, as a punishment for having invented agitprop and upset the citizenry so, was heavily fined. The Athenians’ response to the Persian threat seemed to be to bury their heads deep in the sand.
And yet, just as they knew in their hearts that the Great King’s task force was coming, so they knew that its arrival would leave them with only two effective options: to appease, collaborate, surrender— or to fight. The choice could not be put off for much longer. Evidence for that was everywhere. No sooner had the theatergoers wiped away their tears than another vivid reminder of the storm clouds gathering to the east had arrived in Phalerum harbor. Miltiades came trailing clouds of glory: having fought the barbarians far more heroically than any other Athenian had done, he had escaped the vengeance of the Persian fleet by the skin of his teeth, dodging a squadron sent specially to intercept him and being pursued all the way to Athens. But he also had many enemies closer to home: hated by his peers and feared by the people, his glamour appeared ill suited to an embattled democracy. No sooner had he disembarked than he found himself being prosecuted “for his tyranny in the Chersonese.”25 The trial was set for later in the year.
Much more would hang on the verdict than the fate of Miltiades alone. Would the Athenians have the courage to acquit a man they had long feared as a potential tyrant, yet whose track record as a Mede-fighter was second to none; or would they surrender instead to the more immediate—and traditional—pleasures of factionalism? Every citizen was bound to have a view; but the one with the greatest influence promised to be the chief archon, the annual head of state. This was sufficient to give a particular edge to the elections of 493 BC; and when victory was won by a candidate firmly identified with the anti-appeasement cause, Miltiades must surely have breathed a deep sigh of relief. True, Themistocles was much given to envy, and the temptation to work for the ruin of a charismatic rival must have been considerable; but he resisted it. Miltiades, brought to trial, was acquitted. Shortly afterward, he was elected military head of his tribe—one of ten generals charged with providing advice and support to the Athenians’ supreme commander, the war archon. This, as surely as the burning of the grove at Sepeia had been, must have appeared to Persian spies a defiant statement of intent. It certainly served to give Miltiades a critical influence over the formulation of his city’s defense policy. The democracy, it appeared, had finally made up its mind. The Athenians, like the Spartans, had committed themselves to fight.