Persian Fire (29 page)

On his return from Scythia, the Great King had duly rewarded Histiaeus for his stalwart support of the Persian expedition by summoning him to Sardis, and enquiring graciously of his Milesian
bandaka
if there were any gift that he had his eye on. Since the army that Darius had left behind in Europe was at that very moment advancing westwards from the Chersonese into Thrace, painstakingly conquering the north coast of the Aegean and its interior, Histiaeus, greatly daring, had wondered if he might perhaps be gifted a portion of this splendid new satrapy? The Great King had inclined his head; the request had been granted; Histiaeus had found himself the owner of an area of Thrace named Myrcinus. It was no mean reward: situated on a broad river not far from the empire's new border with the kingdom of Macedon, Darius' gift came complete with silver mines and forests, excellent raw material for a fleet. Histiaeus, unsurprisingly, was delighted. No longer confined to Ionia, he dared to dream of greater things.

But already, even as he hurried to Thrace to found a city on his new property, eyebrows had begun to be raised among the Persian military. After much nervous clearing of throats, words had very respectfully been put to the royal ear. It had been suggested to Darius that Greeks, especially subtle and ambitious Greeks such as Histiaeus, were simply not to be trusted with too much power. It was out of the question, of course, for the Great King, having presented Histiaeus with a reward, to snatch it back; still less for him to admit that he might possibly have made an error. Instead, summoning the Milesian to Sardis, Darius had announced that Histiaeus was to be graced with yet further marks of high esteem: the magnificent title of 'Royal Table-Companion', and an official post as the king's adviser on Greek affairs. Naturally, since Darius would shortly be leaving Sardis, Histiaeus would now have the supreme honour of accompanying his master on his travels. A fixed grin no doubt plastered on his face, Histiaeus had duly been obliged, in 511
bc
, to pack his bags, turn his back on his homeland, and leave for Susa.

Even languishing in the gilded cage of the royal court, however, he did not abandon all his hopes of exploiting Persian dominance to establish an Aegean power base for his dynasty. Back in Miletus, Histiaeus' stand-in as tyrant, his nephew Aristagoras, was soon proving himself a chip off the old block, and a keen student of his uncle's methods. In 500
bc,
he approached Artaphernes with a scheme that he trusted might prove to their mutual benefit. Why not, Aristagoras suggested smoothly to the satrap, send an expedition against the island of Naxos? It was a rare prize, lying midway on any likely invasion route across the Aegean to Greece, and ripe for the plucking. The island was riven by factions; class-war was threatening; the aristocracy were positively begging for Persian intervention. Sardis could provide the ships; Aristagoras himself would provide contacts within the disgruntled Naxian aristocracy. Everyone would be a winner.

Artaphernes, after consultations with his royal brother, duly gave the plan the nod — to Aristagoras' immense, but unspoken, relief. Although he could hardly let slip as much to the satrap, he was finding the delicate balance between the rival demands of his Persian masters and his own people an increasingly precarious one to maintain. Miletus had always been notorious, even by the standards of other Ionian cities, for the savagery of her class hatreds; but recently th
ey had threatened to turn peculiarly internecine. The revolution in Athens, a city which claimed, in the mists of the fabulous past, to have sent the first colonists to Ionia, had been followed as enthusiastically in Miletus as in the islands of the Aegean. Calls for the establishment of a similar democracy, for the overthrow of the tyranny and an end to barbarian rule, were growing increasingly violent in the city's streets. Aristagoras, embarking with the Persian task force for Naxos, knew that he was playing for very high stakes indeed; the consequences of failure simply did not bear contemplation.

Soon enough, however, he would find himself facing them. Everything that could go wrong with the expedition did go wrong. The attempted conquest of Naxos proved a debacle, and Aristagoras, setting the seal on the disaster, then had a monstrous falling-out with the expedition's Persian commander — who just happened to be Artaphernes' cousin. When news of this reached Sardis, the satrap, with the decisiveness he habitually brought to his administration of Ionian affairs, resolved that Aristagoras would have to be replaced, and signed an order to that effect. But Aristagoras himself, with nothing now left to lose, and strongly backed by his uncle in far-off Susa, responded to his dismissal with a startling, not to say acrobatic, volte-face. Abdicating his tyranny before it could be taken from him, he suddenly pronounced himself a keen enthusiast for democracy — so keen, he added loudly, that he would like to see it established in all the Ionian states. This, of course, was to toss a flame into a kindling box: revolution duly flared throughout Ionia, tyrannies were toppled everywhere and democracies proclaimed in their place. Those tyrants who managed to avoid being stoned to death all fled to Artaphernes.

Whose fury was naturally terrible. The Ionians, by raising the banner of democracy, had taken a fateful and perilous step. Having defied the orders of Darius' appointed satrap, and ousted the regimes he had imposed, they had effectively chosen to declare war on the King of Kings. In the first giddy flush of their liberty, this seemed barely to concern most of them. Aristagoras, however, knew better. He at any rate, had no illusions as to the scale of the challenge his countrymen now faced. A superpower such as Persia was not lightly challenged; Artaphernes' desire for revenge was sure to prove swift and devastating. If the rebellious cities - and their dreams - were not to be crushed utterly, they would need, at the barest minimum, not merely a united front but an effective fleet and allies too.

But how to secure them? Aristagoras' fertile mind was already cooking up any number of hopeful plots. The first was particularly audacious. One of his agents, pretending to be an officer loyal to Artaphernes, coolly sailed into the port some miles north of Miletus

where the Persian navy was docked, rounded up all the Ionians serving there as admirals, and proceeded to sail off to Miletus with the fleet.
¹¹
It was a daring and spectacular triumph — and encouraged Aristagoras to embark on a secret mission of his own. In the winter of 499
bc,
he boarded a warship and glided out from the great harbours of his city. Across the bay to the north of Miletus he could see a great spine of rock, the ridge of Mount Mycale, rising above the sea. This was where the Greeks of Asia, in happier times, had been accustomed to meet to celebrate their common bonds, at the sanctuary of the 'Panionium' — 'the shrine of all the Ionians'. There would be opportunity enough, perhaps, for councils of war there, for assemblies of generals, and the plotting of strategy — but not now. Aristagoras had other, more pressing business. Onwards he sailed. Mount Mycale and then, just beyond its westernmost tip, the island of Samos both began to fade over the horizon. Ahead lay the open sea — and the currents that led to Greece.

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 ploughing 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'. Could any foe be more tempting? Particularly since the Spartans had, in one of their kings, a leader with a proven relish for launching pre-emptive 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 behaviour 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 recognise a threat to Sparta in the growing scale of the Great King's ambitions. But not to Sparta alone - nor even pre-eminently. 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 practised 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