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.
That Greece Might Still Be Free
The deadliest enemy that a hoplite had to face in battle was panic. All it took was for one man to despair of victory, to abandon his place in the line, to drop his shield and start shoving his comrades aside in a desperate scrabble to the rear, and a shudder of dread might pass through the whole phalanx, and that single soldier’s flight become within seconds a general rout. An unsettling phenomenon—and one that the Greeks preferred to blame not on mortal fallibility but rather on some freakish supernatural event, the breath of a god, perhaps, sending a chill across the ranks, or the sudden apparition of an angered hero woken from his grave and striding across the battlefield. Yet even this theory, though it might provide balm to the injured pride of a routed army, still carried with it a disturbing implication: that to fight in a phalanx was always to be vulnerable to the faintheartedness of a few. “Men wear helmets and breastplates for their own protection—but shields they carry for the good of everyone who forms the line.”40 March to war without perfect confidence in the stomach of one’s fellows for the coming fight, and a hoplite might well reflect that he was marching to his doom.
So that when men in Athens, looking from their walls to Mount Pentelikon and seeing the blaze of a great beacon there, warning of the Persians’ landing, knew that the moment dreaded for so many years had finally arrived, opinion on how best to meet the peril was by no means unanimous. Fabulous reports of the size of the Asiatic hordes were already swirling through the city, and it was evident even to the soberest Athenian strategist that any army the democracy could put into the field was bound to be horrendously outnumbered. Add to that the invaders’ overwhelming superiority in cavalry and the numbing fact that no Greek army had ever, in fifty years, succeeded in defeating the Persians in open combat, and the arguments for staying put, manning the city’s walls and hunkering down for a siege might have appeared irresistible.
Yet the decision to march from the city and confront the invaders had in fact already been taken. No sooner was it confirmed that the Persians had landed at Marathon than the hoplites of the democracy, all those citizens who could afford to arm themselves, perhaps some ten thousand in total, prepared “to take food with them and march.”41 They left under the command of the war archon, Callimachus—but the strategy was Miltiades’, and it was one that had been adopted, after days of bitter debate in the Assembly, as an official resolution of the Athenian people. The judgment of the city’s greatest Mede fighter was not one to be lightly set aside; and Miltiades, against the claims of everyone who had pushed for a defensive policy, had presented a compelling case of his own. Yes, the invaders had landed in overwhelming force; and yes, they had brought with them their fearsome cavalry; but that was precisely why they had to be met. Two roads led from Marathon round Mount Pentelikon to Athens: only let the Persians take command of one of these, and their horsemen would be granted the whole sweep of Attica. If the Athenians marched quickly, however, and secured the two exits from the plain, they might yet contain the Persian beachhead. True, they would almost certainly then be committing themselves to battle—but it was not only within a phalanx that fraying nerves might breed disaster. It had needed only two traitors to open the gates of Eretria, after all. Could a city such as Athens, one that had been rife for a decade with rumors of treachery, fifth columnists and profiteers from the Great King’s gold, really hope to hold out during a siege? It beggared belief. Better, surely, if the worst came to the worst, to die in harness than to be stabbed ignominiously in the back.