The First Clash (21 page)

Later, after the Ionians were defeated, the Persians captured Histiaios while he was leading a small force scavenging for food. He was brought before Artaphrenes, who, taking no chances that the Greek would convince Darius to spare him, had him immediately impaled.

While Histiaios caused what trouble he could in the Sea of Marmara, both Ionia and Persia spent 495 BC preparing for the climactic battle. Only eight Ionian cities led by Miletus and a few Aegean islands still fought on. Against them were ranged the combined fleets of the Levant, Egypt, Cilicia, and Cyprus: six hundred ships in all.
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From Sardis marched the full strength of the Persian army, which had been mustering there in its multitudes for a year. No longer distracted by operations in the Hellespont or Caria, Artaphrenes concentrated his full might on his primary target—Miletus.

Through a supreme effort, the Greeks assembled the greatest fleet they had yet put to sea. Herodotus presents an exact tally of the contributions each of the parties made by those cities still carrying on the fight:

The small number of ships from some of the Ionian cities was probably the result of having to keep a large number of their men at home to guard each city’s walls. Still, the Milesians, who were the most immediately threatened by the Persian army, knew that the decisive battle would occur at sea and managed to spare enough men from the walls to man eighty
ships. With the Carians out of the fight, the Greeks did not attempt to place an army in the field, and each city saw to its own defense. All of their hopes therefore rested on the fleet, which made camp at the island of Lade (off the coast of Miletus) and waited.

The Persians came, but dealing with the Carians had taught them a lesson that would pay dividends for another two centuries—there were always a significant number of Greeks whom they could buy off. Fearful of the large Greek fleet that had decisively defeated them in their last encounter at Cyprus, the Persian force did not strike immediately. Rather, they had the deposed Ionian tyrants make contact with the forces of their respective cities and promise lenient terms if they were to desert the rebel cause. This carrot was offered alongside the threat of a gruesome stick in the event they fought on: “We shall lead you into captivity as slaves, and we shall turn your sons into eunuchs and drag your virgin daughters away to Bactria and give over your lands to others.”

While the Persians waited for their bribes and threats to do their insidious work, they kept a close eye on the Greek fleet as it practiced its maneuvers. At first, they must have been impressed as the Greeks toiled long hours every day, but shortly the training regimen let up. If we are to believe Herodotus, the Greek crews, men who spent their lives at hard toil, wearied of practice and refused to train. They further claimed that it was wrong for them to follow the orders of the appointed commander, Dionysius of Phocaea, when he had brought only three ships to join them in the coming battle.

What are we to make of this? It is unlikely that the Ionians simply got tired of drilling, as Herodotus claims. To judge what was going on, one must look at matters from their viewpoint. After half a decade of war, they were further away from winning independence than ever. Now, despite having inflicted tremendous blows on the enemy’s armies and fleets, the Persians had not become disheartened and given up the fight. Instead, they had patiently rebuilt their forces and come on stronger than ever. The Greeks were making one more supreme effort in the knowledge that defeat meant ruin, but with equal certainty that victory meant they would probably confront an even stronger Persian force the following year. Moreover, by this time the Persian army was probably besieging Miletus and controlled the shores. The task of feeding over fifty thousand unanticipated sailors would have been difficult under any circumstances, but with the Persians at the city walls it was impossible.
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It would not have been long before the ships’ crews were on short rations, which would account
for their dissatisfaction with their appointed leaders. Moreover, the fleet remained crowded together in what must have been an unsanitary mass of humanity and a superb disease incubator. Under such circumstances, dissension was inevitable. Dispirited, dealing with gnawing hunger, and with sickness spreading, many began looking on the Persian offer with greater favor.

When the Samian fleet alerted its former tyrant that it was ready to desert, the Persians considered their work done. They sailed out to offer battle under the command of a Persian officer named Datis, who later commanded the Persian forces at Marathon, with a rising star, Mardonius, as his second in command. The 353 ships of the Greek fleet were waiting in a line that must have extended almost two miles. Aligned on the eastern wing, close to their own city, were the 80 ships of the Milesians. To their right were ships from Priene, followed in order by Myous, Teos, Chios, Erythrai, Phocaea, and Lesbos and with those of Samos anchoring the west wing.

As the battle lines closed, disaster struck. The Samians set their sails and made for home, using the same wind propelling the Persians forward to make good their escape. The Lesbians, seeing their flanks exposed by the Samians’ treachery, also set their sails and escaped.
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The remaining Greeks were doomed. Still, they fought hard and died hard, with the Chians particularly distinguishing themselves.

In the aftermath of battle, the Greek survivors made land at Ephesus, where the locals supposedly mistook them for raiders bent on seizing Ephesian women. Showing a ferocity they never displayed against the Persians, the Ephesian men sallied forth to slaughter the exhausted Chian crews. Interestingly, the Ephesians did not send any ships to join the Ionian fleet at Lade. It just might be that they had already made a deal with the Persians and thought that killing the Chian crews would gain them further favor with Darius. The tale of their mistakenly killing the Chians because they believed them to be raiders may then be considered a cover story created for a time when it was no longer wise to admit they had helped the Persians. Herodotus does report that the Greek commander, Dionysius, broke through the Persian battle line and with three ships eventually escaped to Sicily. Here he turned to a life of piracy but refused to plunder Greek shipping, opting to grow rich attacking only Carthaginian and Etruscan vessels.

The rest of the Ionian war is easily summed up. Miletus was taken by storm. As the leading city of the revolt, it was treated particularly harshly,
and the majority of the inhabitants were either slaughtered or enslaved.
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After Miletus’s fall, all that was left for the Persians were mopping-up operations. In short order, each of the remaining Ionian cities either surrendered or fell by storm. At first, the Persians made good on their threats and enacted a policy of terror. According to Herodotus:

Later tradition probably exaggerated the reprisals (except possibly in the case of Miletus), as in a very short time a level of normalcy returned. Just fourteen years later, Darius’s successor, Xerxes, was confident enough of Ionian loyalty to place substantial levies on them for participation in the great invasion of Greece in 480 BC. In 492 BC, the Ionians must have been shocked when a new Persian military commander, Mardonius, the second in command at the Battle of Lade, replaced the recently reinstalled Ionian tyrants with democracies.
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It is worth noting that these were democracies that were ruled by a king and his provincial governors. In this regard, they would be akin to the local democracies China allows many towns and cities, where voters are given a choice among various Communist Party members. Many times in history, appearance trumps reality. The Ionians may have been pleased with the appearance of democracy, but no one doubted who was truly running things.

Mardonius had under his command a new army, probably raised in the expectation that the Ionian revolt would continue another year, as well as numerous veterans of the earlier fighting who had not wished to be demobilized yet.
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He took this army to the Hellespont and crossed into Thrace, which had broken away from Persian control during the Ionian revolt. The going was easy at first, and most of the cities and tribes in the region submitted without offering any resistance, including the Macedonians, who became, Herodotus says contemptuously, “slaves of the Persians.”
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Greek tradition says that Mardonius’s true plan was to march into Greece in order to undertake the punishment of Eretria and Athens and
that this aim was thwarted only by twin disasters that befell him in the fall of 492 BC.

While Mardonius’s fleet was sailing around the treacherous waters of Mount Athos, a northeasterly gale struck it, wrecking three hundred ships and drowning many of their crews.
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This disaster was followed by defeat on land, when his army was set upon by an unconquered Thracian tribe—the Byrogi—while it was encamped in Macedonia. According to Herodotus, the Byrogi “slaughtered many of them [Persians] and wounded Mardonius himself.” It is likely that later Greek tradition magnified both of these disasters. Even Herodotus states that Mardonius did not leave the region until he had killed many of the Byrogi and enslaved the rest.
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Given the lateness of the season, it would appear unlikely that Mardonius ever contemplated an invasion of Greece, and there is certainly no evidence that he had made any preparations to do so. The Greeks may have felt threatened by a large army so close to their northern borders, but it seems clear that Mardonius’s only mission was to enforce Persian power in the lands that had previously submitted. In this, he thoroughly succeeded.

But Darius had not forgotten the insult that Athens and Eretria had offered him. All along the coast of the empire, ports were alive with shipbuilding activities, for Darius had ordered the construction of a great fleet, including special transports for his cavalry. Alongside this construction, the Persian general Datis began to gather the battle-hardened veterans of the Ionian revolt and Mardonius’s expedition. As this irresistible force assembled, Darius sent forth his envoys to demand the tokens of submission from the Aegean islands and the Greek mainland cities. The answers came back: Many had submitted and sent back earth and water to Darius.

Sparta and Athens killed the Persian envoys.
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For them, it would be war.

SPARTA SAVES GREECE

A
fter the Athenians abandoned their early intervention in the Ionian revolt, both they and the Spartans adamantly refused all entreaties to send reinforcements to their beleaguered Greek brethren. The ancient sources never make clear why both cities refused this aid, when it was obvious that the next object of Persian attention would be Greece proper. What appears to have happened is that the Spartans, deterred by the very size of the Persian Empire, refused to consider dispatching their army for a ninety-day march into Asia’s hinterlands. As for Athens, there were many in the city who had always opposed an overt anti-Persian policy, and with the ruin of the first expedition, after torching Sardis, this party was in the ascendancy.

No doubt both reasons played a role in Athens’s and Sparta’s decisions to keep their armies close to home. However, there were more pressing reasons. For Sparta, the failure to rally its Peloponnesian allies for the attack on Athens years before was not just a diplomatic setback; it was a warning. Argos, Sparta’s ancient and most dangerous rival in the Peloponnesus, was again on the rise, and it was beginning to flex its muscle. As long as the other cities in the Peloponnesus could turn to Argos for support and protection, they would always be able to thwart Spartan desires. Corinth made this explicit in 431 BC at the start of the Peloponnesian War, but it must have been a strong, if unspoken, factor in 496 BC, when the allies stood together and defied Spartan wishes. It was obvious to Cleomenes that if Spartan supremacy was to be made real, Sparta would have to humble Argos again, and it would have to be done with a purely Spartan army. As for Athens, it had troubles of its own. Thebes and Chalcis had
sued for peace, but Aegina was still prosecuting its war against Athens. The Athenians could have dealt with Aegina, and would later do so decisively, but with a restive Thebes to the north and Spartan intentions uncertain, it could not focus on its immediate enemy. Moreover, Aegina was the preeminent naval power in the region, and it would be another decade before Athens could afford to assemble a fleet powerful enough to contest the seas.