No one in Athens had the slightest doubt that the Great King was personally resolved upon the destruction of the democracy. When Darius had been brought the news that Sardis was burning, it was said that he had called for his bow, that awful totem of royal power, and fired an arrow high into the air, praying to Ahura Mazda as he did so that he might punish the Athenians as they merited. Such was his fury that the royal appetite was supposed never entirely to have recovered from the shock. Day after day, it was rumored, year after year, every time that Darius sat down at his table to eat, a servant would whisper softly into his ear, “Master, remember the Athenians.”26
No mean feat, of course, for a previously obscure people on the very edge of the world to be mentioned daily within the inner sanctum of Persepolis. The Athenians, even as they made their flesh creep by imagining themselves singled out for the Great King’s vengeance, could also feel a certain shiver of desperate pride at the idea. Indeed, the fact that Darius had signally failed to come sweeping across Asia against them suggested that they might just possibly be flattering themselves. Certainly, the true scale of the Great King’s empire and the demands upon his attention were utterly beyond the comprehension of most Greeks. Cleomenes, informed during the course of his abortive interview with Aristagoras that Susa lay more than three months’ march beyond the sea, had leapt up in startled disbelief; and yet, east of Susa, the Great King’s dominions took a further three months to cross in turn. It would have been small comfort for the Athenians, as they awaited their hour of doom, but teaching them a lesson was not the only, nor even the most pressing, of Darius’ concerns.
But that is not to say it was no concern at all. The Great King’s memory was capacious and his reach global. Not a crisis on a far-distant border but he would be kept closely informed of it. Staggering as the distances within his dominion were, so was the ingenuity with which his servants worked to shrink them. No one could fail to be dazzled by the speed of the Persians’ communications. Fire beacons, flaring from lookout to lookout, might keep the Great King abreast of an incident almost as it brewed. In the more mountainous regions of the empire, and particularly in Persia itself, where the valleys offered excellent acoustics, more detailed information might be brought by aural relay. The Persians, schooled “in the arts of breath control, and the effective use of their lungs,”27 were well known to have the loudest voices in the world; many a message, echoing from cliffs and ravines, had been brought within the day over terrain that a man on foot would have struggled to cover within a month. As the Persians understood to a degree never before rivaled, information was dominance. Master information, and master all the world.
The ultimate basis of Persian greatness, then, was not its bureaucracy, nor even its armies, but its roads. Precious filaments of dust and packed dirt, these provided the immensity of the empire’s body with its nervous system, along which news was perpetually flowing, from synapse to synapse, to and from the brain. The distances which had so appalled Cleomenes were routinely annihilated by royal couriers. Every evening, after a hard day’s ride, the messenger would find a posting station waiting for him, equipped with a bed, provisions and a fresh horse for the morning. A truly urgent message, one brought at a gallop through storms and the dead of night, might arrive in Persepolis from the Aegean in under two weeks. This was an incredible, almost magical, degree of speed. Nothing to equal it had ever been known before. No wonder that the Great King’s control of such a service—the original information superhighway—should so have overawed his subjects, and struck them as the surest gauge and manifestation of Persian power.
Access to it was ferociously restricted. No one could set foot upon the king’s roads without a pass, a “viyataka.” Since every travel document was issued either directly from Persepolis or by a satrap’s office, mere possession of one spelt prestige. Indeed, it was in the “viyataka” that those twin manias of Persian imperialism, for shuffling forms and for rigid social stratification, most perfectly met and fused. There was no better way for an official to discover his precise place in the imperial pecking order than to arrive at a posting station for the night, hand over his viyataka to the manager, and count out the rations that it brought him in return. If he were one of the greatest men of the kingdom—one of Darius’ six coconspirators, say—then he and his retinue might receive up to a hundred quarts of wine. If he ranked at the bottom of the food chain, then he might find himself, humiliatingly, on a lower wine ration than a particularly favored horse. So satisfying did the Persians find the viyataka as a basis for ordering the world that not only officials and soldiers but women and children, and even birds, found themselves definitively fixed within the imperial scheme of things by ration chits. A duck, for instance, if it were being fattened for the royal table, could look forward to downing a quart of wine every day. A young girl, by comparison, might have to get by on one a week.
Men, women, children, horses, waterfowl: none could elude the meticulous prescriptions of Darius’ bureaucrats. It was not only within the satrapal courts that the Great King had his “eyes,” forever watching, scanning, tracking. Every transaction carried out within a posting station required a form to be stamped by both manager and recipient, and then forwarded to a central archive in Persepolis. So tightly controlled were the itineraries of travelers on the royal roads that those who dawdled on the way and failed to arrive at a given destination on an allotted date could expect to forfeit their rations for the night. Those who traveled on the roads without a viyataka at all would not merely go hungry but very quickly be hunted down and killed. Even mail, if it were sent without royal or satrapal approval, would be destroyed. Only the most cunning could hope to evade the vigilance of the highway patrols. Histiaeus, for instance, back in 499 BC, desperate to communicate with his nephew in far-off Miletus about his plans for revolt, had shaved the head of his most trustworthy slave, tattooed a message on the gleaming scalp, and patiently waited for the hair to grow back. “Then, once the slave had a full head again, Histiaeus sent him to Miletus with orders to do nothing except tell Aristagoras to shave him, and inspect what stood revealed.”28 Such was the inventiveness required of those without a viyataka.
How, then, were enemies of the Great King ever to compete with all Darius’ prodigious resources of intelligence? Not very well, was the answer. The Ionian rebels, for instance, pinned on the outermost rim of Asia, had only ever had the haziest notions of Persian troop movements and intentions—a failure set into stark relief by the startling ability of Darius, 1500 miles from the theater of war, to track events almost as though he were on the spot. It was he, for instance, in the early weeks of 494 BC, who had personally drawn up plans for the final offensive that a few months later would result in the great Persian victory at Lade and the sacking of Miletus. Darius’ information on that occasion had been particularly precise and detailed, for his leading military specialist on Greek affairs, a general by the name of Datis, had traveled directly by express service from Ionia to keep him abreast of the latest news from the front. Nothing could better have indicated the supreme importance attached to intelligence by the Great King than that a man of Datis’ stature should have made the long journey to Persepolis in person. Datis—like Harpagus, the original conqueror of Ionia—was a Mede; but he was also, in the competitive world of ration chits and security passes, quite as weighty a player as any Persian grandee. His daily wine ration was seventy quarts: a drinking allowance at which a sister of the King would not have turned up her nose. Due reward for an exceptional military ability and record.
True, the Persian intelligence services did not always have things their own way; nor was Darius’ eye for talent necessarily infallible. One of the worst debacles had occurred a couple of years before Datis’ arrival in Persepolis, when the Great King, in a startling display of misjudgment, had sent Histiaeus back to Sardis as his personal agent. Appalled at having to welcome the slippery Milesian to his headquarters but reluctant to offend his brother, Artaphernes had pointedly revealed to Histiaeus the full scale of his suspicions, hoping thereby to intimidate his unwelcome guest into openly going over to the enemy. “‘Let’s not beat about the bush,’” the satrap had menaced. “‘Aristagoras may have worn the shoe, but you were the one who made it.’”29 Histiaeus, turning pale, had got the message, but flight from Sardis that very night had hardly ended his capacity for mischief. Fishing in the murky waters of espionage circles with consummate skill, revealing himself first to one side then to the other as a double agent, he had sought to turn Artaphernes’ more underhand methods back against their perpetrator, daring even to foment rebellion within the satrapal court itself. Greeks, it appeared, were not the only people who could be set against one another: the crisis briefly appeared so threatening that Artaphernes, struggling frantically to maintain his authority, had been forced into a wholesale purge of his countrymen. Such ruthlessness, fortunately for the satrap, had been just sufficient to prevent a disintegration of the Persian provincial command—and, of course, from that moment on, Histiaeus had been a marked man. No episode in the entire quashing of the Ionians’ revolt can have given Artaphernes greater pleasure than the capture, a year after the victory at Lade, of his brother’s treacherous former favorite. Hauled to Sardis in chains, the irrepressible Histiaeus had coolly insisted that he be returned to the Great King—a demand which Artaphernes had duly met by impaling him, and then sending his severed head, pickled and packed in salt, by express post to Susa.
The execution of Histiaeus, and the parallel escape of Miltiades to Athens, had marked the effective end of Ionian resistance. Not of Artaphernes’ labors, however. Having won the war, it was now his equally arduous task to win the peace. Ionia had been trampled underfoot by six summers of savage warfare. Fields lay uncultivated, ships rotted idly in stagnant harbors, roads had vanished beneath grass, villages and whole cities stood abandoned in blackened ruin. As the Ionians starved, so, inevitably, they began to scrap desperately over the few fields not lost to nettles and brambles; and, bled of nearly all their energy and manpower though they were, they reached for their weapons again. Artaphernes, having none of it, stepped in at once. Representatives of the various Ionian states were summoned to Sardis and briskly ordered to swear an oath of perpetual amity. Henceforward, all border disputes were to be settled not by the armed squabbling that was traditional among the Greeks but by arbitration, backed up directly by the sanction of Persian force. As even the Ionians themselves acknowledged, this was a development “not entirely to their disadvantage.”30 To protect his subjects from their own worst instincts, to promote stability, to facilitate a regular flow of tribute: this, as it had always been, remained the satrap’s default policy. Terror having served its purpose, Artaphernes could now return with a sigh of relief to the winning of his subjects’ hearts and minds. Having been made all too aware of the Ionians’ distaste for tyranny, he was even prepared to indulge in certain circumstances their preference for democracies. After all, just as long as the king’s peace was kept, it scarcely mattered how the Greeks chose to rule themselves.
This indulgence was not extended, of course, to those who remained in arms. Even as Artaphernes applied to bleeding Ionia the balm of a settlement long remembered afterward as a model of fairness and justice, so the continued defiance of the Athenians remained an open wound. A standing menace too. The longer that the punishment of Athens was delayed, the greater was the risk that terrorist states might proliferate throughout the mountainous and inaccessible wilds of Greece: a nightmare prospect for any Persian strategist. Geopolitics, however, was far from the only prompting at the back of the Great King’s mind. Not for nothing had Ahura Mazda delivered the world into his hands. No more sacred duty had been laid upon him than the obligation to storm, wherever they might fester, the strongholds of the Lie. Athens was a nest of rebels, to be sure—but the city also stood revealed, far more sinisterly, as the home of demons, “daiva,” false gods who had chosen the path of rebellion against the Lord Mazda, “following the course of Wrath, sickening the lives of men.”31 Only fire, of the kind that had already cleansed and purged the shrines of the Ionians, could possibly redeem Athens and her temples from the Lie. For the spiritual good of the universe, as well as the future stability of Ionia, the entire Aegean would have to be transformed into a Persian lake—and without delay. Staging post in a thrilling new phase of imperial expansion and holy war: the burning of Athens promised to be both.
But how best to achieve it? Two policies suggested themselves: to complete the conquest of the land approaches along the coast of the north Aegean; and simultaneously to menace the cities of Greece into surrender. In pursuance of the first goal, a fleet and a fresh army were dispatched to Thrace in the spring of 492 BC, with orders to extend Persian dominance ever further westward, into Macedonia and perhaps beyond. Their commander, a dashing young nobleman by the name of Mardonius, arrived on the western front already bathed in the golden glow of natural charisma. The son of Gobryas, Darius’ closest friend among the Seven, his intimacy with the royal household had been confirmed by his marriage to the Great King’s daughter. But Mardonius was not merely prodigiously well connected; he was also a general of authentic élan and flair. Alexander, the King of Macedon, quickly bowed to the inevitable: Macedonia was formally absorbed into the dominions of the Great King, whose remit now extended to the foothills of Mount Olympus. True, the victory was slightly tarnished when Mardonius’ entire fleet was shipwrecked in a storm off Mount Athos, and Mardonius himself, launching an overexuberant assault on a troublesome mountain tribe, was badly wounded—but these setbacks were hardly severe enough to undermine Persian prestige. Macedonia, certainly, remained solid for the Great King; Alexander, practiced weathervane that he was, could still tell precisely which way the wind was blowing.
But the key question for Persian strategists was whether the Greeks to the south would show themselves similarly sensitive to the political weather. In 491 BC, a year after the conquest of Macedonia, ambassadors were sent on a exploratory tour of Greece, with demands for earth and water. Most cities, gratifyingly, scurried to oblige. Some, however, did not. Two, in particular, could not have made their adherence to the darkness of the Lie, and to the daiva, those “spawn of evil purpose,”32 any clearer. In Athens, not only were the Great King’s demands dismissed out of hand, but his ambassadors, in blatant defiance of international law, were put on trial by the Assembly, convicted and put to death. Perhaps—given that Athens was a proven terrorist state, and that the man who had initiated the diplomats’ execution was Miltiades, a notorious fugitive from the Great King’s justice— this outrage was no surprise. More shocking, and more disturbing in its implications, was that the Spartans chose to blacken themselves with an even worse act of sacrilege. There was no trial for the Great King’s ambassadors in Sparta: instead, flung down a well, they were told before they drowned that “if they wanted earth and water, they could find it there.”33
This, in its naked defiance, its savage wit and its cavalier disregard for religious convention, was a spectacular that had Cleomenes’ fingerprints all over it. The Athenian democracy, it appeared, had indeed arrived at an accommodation with the Spartan king who had twice tried to destroy it. When the Athenians, discovering that Aegina had handed over earth and water to the Great King, reported the news to Sparta, Cleomenes traveled in person to berate the medizers. The merchant princes of Aegina, however, with their dependence on international trade, were reluctant to offend the great superpower to the east—even on the say-so of a Spartan king. Searching for a way to outflank Cleomenes, they appealed to Demaratus, his fellow king. Demaratus, grateful for any opportunity to stab his hated rival in the back again, eagerly pledged his support. The Aeginetans were encouraged to stand firm. Cleomenes was rebuffed.
Covert though Demaratus’ role in this business had been, however, it was not so covert that his colleague failed to sniff it out. Cleomenes’ counterthrust, delivered immediately on his return to Sparta, was brutal and cunningly aimed. Resolved now to finish off his insufferable colleague once and for all, Cleomenes approached Demaratus’ cousin, a spiteful nonentity by the name of Leotychides, and promised him the throne if he would help bring down his kinsman. Leotychides, unsurprisingly, jumped at the chance. As his enemies were well aware, Demaratus had an old skeleton just waiting to be dragged out of the closet. Tangled though the circumstances of Cleomenes’ own birth were, those of his fellow king were hardly less so. Demaratus’ mother, the once plain girl granted the gift of loveliness by the apparition of Helen, had become such a beauty that the King of Sparta, overwhelmed by her charms, had used his royal muscle to abduct her from her husband. Seven months later, the new queen had given birth to a son. But was the father the king or the commoner? A question long settled, it might have been thought, by the fact that the queen’s son—Demaratus himself—had by 491 BC been on the throne for twenty-four years. A mere detail to Cleomenes, though; and when Leotychides, raking up the issue of Demaratus’ legitimacy, proposed taking the case to Delphi for arbitration, judicious bribes to the priesthood had already guaranteed Apollo’s complicity.
The oracle duly pronounced against Demaratus. Back in Sparta he was formally deposed by the ephors, and Leotychides, pliable and venal, took his place. Accompanied by his new colleague, Cleomenes promptly returned to confront the Aeginetans, who this time, rather than dare defy two Spartan kings, capitulated on the spot. They even agreed, when Cleomenes demanded it, to hand over hostages as a token of their good behavior to their bitterest foes, the Athenians. No longer would a Persian task force arriving off Attica be able to use Aegina as a base. Cleomenes, long reviled by his neighbors, suddenly found himself widely lauded for his selfless labors “in the common cause of Greece.”34 Persian agents were confirmed in their judgment of the Spartan king as their most dangerous and able foe, and the major obstruction to the Great King’s plans for the West.
Yet all was far from lost. As the Persians had often had good cause to appreciate, there was no Greek front so united that it might not at any moment disintegrate. Just when Cleomenes appeared to have shored up his position for good, news of the bribes that he had given Delphi suddenly leaked out. The scandal burst over Sparta. Outrage was universal. Cleomenes, caught red-handed for once, was forced to flee the city in disgrace. Not, of course, that exile was a fate he was remotely prepared to take lying down. Disdaining to beg his fellow citizens for permission to return, he sought to intimidate them instead. Cleomenes had always had a talent for setting the cat among the pigeons, but now it led him into blatant treachery. Reversing the policy of divide and rule that he had promoted to such effect throughout his reign, he sought to rally the northern Peloponnese to his personal cause—and to such effect that his jittery countrymen lost their nerve and hurriedly invited him back. But hardly in a forgiving mood; and Cleomenes, by returning to Sparta, was effectively sealing his doom. It began to be whispered that he was mad. The Spartans themselves blamed alcohol. The Argives preferred to see in Cleomenes’ decline sure proof of the anger of the gods. Whatever the cause, though, virtually everyone agreed that the king who only a year previously had been hailed as the bulwark of Greece was now a lunatic. There were few complaints when his two surviving half-brothers, Leonidas and Cleombrotus, late in 491 BC, had him certified and locked up in the stocks. Nor were many eyebrows raised when his corpse was found the following morning, slices of flesh carved off his legs, hips and belly, a bloodstained knife dropped in the dirt by his side. The verdict, one that pushed plausibility to its outer limits but was nevertheless universally accepted: suicide.
So perished the Great King’s most formidable enemy in Greece. With him also passed a style of leadership—unscrupulous, to be sure, but decisive and proactive—that the naturally cautious Spartans had never ceased to find alarming. Indeed, the squalid circumstances of Cleomenes’ end did much to confirm them in their suspicion of strong leaders altogether. True, Leonidas, the new king, was his brother’s successor in more ways than one, for he had married, with her father’s blessing, Gorgo, Cleomenes’ only child—as wealthy as an heiress as she had been precocious as a little girl. All the same, Leonidas remained, as a man new upon the throne and possibly tainted by fratricide, an unknown quantity: he was bound to take some time to find his feet. Who else was there, then, with the Persian hammer blow threatening, to take a lead? Leotychides? He was too busy crowing over the wretched Demaratus. The Gerousia? Or the Ephorate? Both were instinctively conservative bodies, far less likely to sanction a policy of forward defense than Cleomenes had been. Persian spies, feeding intelligence back to Sardis that winter, had much good news to report of Sparta. The turmoil in the city, the faction fighting that would have struck Darius’ strategists as so inveterately Greek, appeared to offer them their perfect opening: the opportunity to strike at Athens and take her out while she stood alone.
A chance not to be missed. In the early weeks of 490 BC, the long-awaited invasion order was finally given. A large army, “powerful and well equipped,” totaling perhaps some 25,000 men in all, marched out from Susa.35 With Mardonius still recovering from his injuries, command of the expedition was entrusted to two other generals with detailed knowledge of the western front: Artaphernes, son and namesake of the satrap in Sardis; and, as effective supremo, Datis the Mede, the seventy-quarts-a-day veteran of the Ionian revolt, and a man who, unusually for a member of the imperial elite, had such a specialized understanding of the enemy that he could actually speak some faltering Greek. The strategy these two commanders were to follow had been mapped out for them directly by the Great King: cross the Aegean with an immense armada, bring the benefits of Persian rule and peace to all the islands, and then, that objective completed, “reduce Athens and Eretria to slavery, and bring the slaves before the king.”36 The conquest of the rest of Greece, including Sparta and the Peloponnese, was to wait; and yet, even as Darius’ instructions stood, the planned expedition was an ambitious one. Certainly, as an amphibious operation, it promised to be on a scale not witnessed since the invasion of Egypt thirty-five years before. On top of that, the plan not to hug the coast but to island-hop directly to Greece was as bold and innovatory a strategy as any that even Darius had conceived.
Yet Datis and Artaphernes can have had little doubt as to their ultimate success. Every day’s journey westward brought them fresh evidence of the barely believable scale of the Great King’s resources: the labor gangs toiling to maintain the roads, whole populations sometimes, transplanted from the furthest reaches of the earth; the guards, stationed beside every bridge, every flotilla of pontoons, every mountain pass; the troops in their own rear, not merely Persians and Medes, but levies drawn from even further east, Bactrians, Sogdians and axe-wielding Saka. What was Athens to peoples such as these? Not even a name. Yet on they marched, directed by the will of their far-off, all-seeing king; and every evening, no matter where they halted, these men from the steppes, from the mountains, from the villages of Iran, they would be provisioned out of monstrous depots, supplied punctiliously with jugs of wine, and loaves of bread, and barley for their horses. And when at last, having passed through the Syrian Gates and descended into the plain of Cilicia, on the southeastern coast of modern-day Turkey, they found there waiting for them an immense fleet of ships, some built as weapons of war, others as horse transports. Up the gangplanks they climbed, men and horses alike; Datis gave the order; and the armada pulled out to sea.
Rumors of its approach were soon filtering through to Greece. No one there was unduly alarmed. Although the monstrous fleet was clearly bound for the Aegean, even to the jumpy Athenians it hardly seemed to be an imminent threat. Plenty of Persian fleets had been seen off Ionia before, after all—and they had always sailed northward, hugging the coast, on to the Hellespont. What reason to think that this fleet would take a different course? Onward the armada glided, past the ruined harbors of Miletus, toward the straits between Mount Mycale and the island of Samos—or so it appeared. But then, just by Samos, something wholly unexpected: the fleet suddenly changed its course. A shudder of disbelief passed through all those watching from the shore. The Persians were not continuing northward but heading west! There could be only one possible explanation: Datis and his task force were embarked for the open sea, for Greece—for Attica.
And as the Persian fleet fanned out across the Aegean, so its commander gave a master class in the arts of empire building. First: shock and awe. Gliding into the harbor of a startled Naxos, he took belated revenge for the debacle of the expedition there a decade previously by torching the city and rounding up the natives as slaves, dragging them onto his ships in chains as their homes and temples burned. Next: win hearts and minds. Arriving off his next port of call, the island of Delos, holy throughout the Greek world as the birthplace of Artemis and Apollo, Datis reacted to the news that the Delians had fled before his approach with injured innocence. “You men illumined by the sacred,” he expostulated, “what a strange notion of me you must have, that you run away in this manner!”37 This might have been thought a disingenuous complaint—for the Persians, after the fall of Miletus, had thought nothing of sacking the holy oracle of Didyma and carting off its great bronze statue of Apollo to Ecbatana. But the Delians were sorely mistaken if they imagined that this stern treatment of the rebels’ shrine had in any way implied disrespect for great Apollo! After all, it was the rebels themselves who had shown the god of light the grossest disrespect, by turning to the Lie and thereby surrendering his holy oracle to the night-bred pollutions of the daiva. Datis, resolved that this theological subtlety should not be lost on the Greeks, duly staged a spectacular demonstration of his devotion to the Lord Apollo, standing before the god’s altar and burning in his honor barrowloads of frankincense. Then, his point expensively made, he returned to the fleet to continue his tour of the islands, receiving their submission, taking hostages, press-ganging troops. None thought to resist him. The twin clouds of smoke—one belching black from the flames of burning Naxos, the other white and perfume-scented, rising to the nostrils of Apollo himself—had done their work. It was as though the armada, heading for Eretria and Athens, still sailed beneath their shadow—and as though that same shadow were drifting westward, inexorably, to plunge all Greece into darkness.
Sure enough, by late July, Datis had reached the easternmost tip of Euboea.38 He was now within sight of Attica. Athens, however, would have to wait; for, rather than crossing directly to the mainland, Datis had decided that he would aim first for the smaller and less formidable of the two targets on Darius’ hit list. Forty-five miles up the ever-narrowing straits that separated Attica from Euboea the Persian fleet sailed, until at last, well inland and framed against a backdrop of mountain peaks, the rebel city of Eretria could be made out, its acropolis a rugged hump set amid a narrow plain of fields and olive groves. Scanning the shore nervously, Datis was soon breathing a sigh of relief; for the Eretrians, rather than fighting his task force on the landing beaches, where it would have been most vulnerable, had opted instead to retreat behind their walls. The Persians duly started their assault. For five long days, the fighting was bloody and desperate; on the sixth, treachery handed the city to the besiegers. Two fifth columnists opened the gates. They both came, as Datis had surely known they would, from the aristocracy—indeed, were “the most respected men in all of Eretria.”39 Intimidate the masses, flatter the elite: once again, the Persians’ favored policy had triumphantly proved its worth. As in Ionia, so now in Euboea, gutted ruins bore witness to the aptitude of the Greeks for treachery and class hatred.
And one man, turning from the spectacle of blazing Eretria and the coffles of slaves being readied for deportation, would surely have seen in it a foreshadowing of the fate of his own city and his own people, unless they could only be persuaded to see reason, to open their gates, to welcome him back. Hippias, the exiled tyrant of Athens, was more than eighty years old now. He had not seen his native land for two decades. Yet he devoutly believed himself the Athenians’ last, best hope. Only he could divert the justified fury of the Great King from them; only he could hope to restore his wretched city to the sunlit uplands of Darius’ favor.
It was with no sense of guilt, then, but rather through patriotism and a belief in his own destiny, that the aged Pisistratid boarded a Persian ship and guided Datis’ fleet back the way it had sailed. Across the straits, on the far side of the Euboean Gulf, the coast of Attica rose rugged and steep from the water. There could be no landing there on its northern coast. But only round the headland, and the perfect spot was waiting: a scimitar-shaped bay wide and sheltered from the winds, with beaches where a whole fleet of ships might be drawn up, a plain beyond it, ideal for Datis’ cavalry, and a choice of two roads leading onward round Mount Pentelikon to Athens. Hippias would have had good cause to remember the place. More than fifty years previously, he and his brother had landed there with their father, Pisistratus, when the would-be tyrant, at the third attempt, had finally succeeded in establishing his rule over Athens for good. Now, with the Persian fleet driving toward the same disembarkation point, Hippias knew that history, surely, was on the verge of repeating itself. Just as his brother’s visions had once done, so now his own had offered a tantalizing glimpse of what was to come. The previous night he had dreamed that he was sleeping with his mother; and so, as the prow of his ship met slushy sand, the old man readied himself to disembark, to embrace his native land, to prove the omen true. He was home at last.
Meanwhile, all around him, the bay was black with ships, and men were clambering into the waters, and wading onto the seaweed-matted beach, thousands upon thousands of them, an armed multitude of an order never before seen in Greece; and already, far and wide, Persian outriders were raising dust across the plain of Marathon.