Then nine tents, called “sunshades,” were set up in the countryside. In each of them nine citizens, representing Sparta’s phratries, or brotherhoods, and obae, which were population subgroups or villages, feasted together in honor of the god. Pheidippides delivered his message. According to Herodotus, he said: “Men of Sparta, the Athenians ask you to help them, and not stand by while the most ancient city of Greece is crushed and enslaved by a foreign invader.”
The ephors were apparently moved by this appeal and replied that Sparta was willing in principle to supply troops, but not now. The Carnea prevented them, but when the festivities were over and the moon was full on August 11 to 12 they would act.
Were the ephors being sincere? On the one hand the Spartans were devout and made a point of obeying the wishes of the gods; on the other, they had a way of turning events into convenient obstacles. Perhaps they were not displeased at being unable to save the Athenians with all their negligent arrogance. They had humiliated the Spartans when King Cleomenes tried to intervene in the affairs of Attica. They deserved being cut down to size.
Whatever the truth, Pheidippides had no choice but to make his sad way home empty-handed. How was Athens to survive, he must have wondered, and would the old goat-god come to the rescue?
—
The Great King Darius had not put aside his anger with the Athenians, who had sent twenty ships to join the Ionian rebels. He could not forgive either them or a detachment from Eretria, a polis on the island of Euboea with a long record of maritime trading, for having torched the capital of Lydia, Croesus’s old capital and a jewel in the Achaemenid crown. He took the matter personally and just in case it might slip his mind he ordered one of his household to say to him three times before dinner: “Sir, remember the Athenians.”
But he was in no particular hurry. He would address the issue when he was ready. Of greater importance was, as we have seen, a strategic plan to regain control of Thrace, which the Persians had conquered in about 512.
Details are lacking, but Darius’s original intention may have been to extend his empire to the defensible frontier of the river Danube and to control, or at least influence, the unruly kingdom of Macedon. This would have the useful consequence of preventing the sale of Ukrainian grain to Greece and, more especially, to Athens, which was increasingly dependent on food imports. The campaign was tougher going than he had imagined. He found himself obliged to fight Thrace’s uneasy neighbors on the far side of the Danube. Eventually he left for home, handing over the command to one of his generals, who completed the conquest.
The campaign’s most striking achievement was a bridge of boats crossing the Bosphorus, over which his army marched from Asia to Europe. Long after it had been dismantled, two pillars were erected on the European side that recorded all the names of the ethnic groups which contributed contingents to the Persian host.
The engineer who designed the bridge was a certain Mandrocles, a Greek from Samos. He spent some of his fee on a painting of his remarkable feat of construction. It was displayed in a temple of Hera on his home island. An inscription read:
After bridging the fish-rich Bosphorus,
Mandrocles dedicated this to Hera
As a memorial to his bridge of boats,
Winning a crown for himself, and glory for Samos,
For his achievement gave pleasure to king Darius.
A second bridge was built to enable Darius’s foray beyond the Danube.
About fifteen years later, after the quelling of the Ionians, the untameable Thracians rose up in revolt. In 492, the Great King sent Mardonius, one of his most valued officials, to reassert Persian dominance; he was a nobleman who had helped Darius win the throne and was both his nephew and son-in-law. After his confidently expected victory he was to proceed through Macedonia to Greece. There he would teach Eretria and Athens a severe and unforgettable lesson.
At the outset all went well; Thrace was brought to heel and King Alexander of Macedon made his submission, a humiliation that his successors did not forget. But then a great storm wrecked much of the Persian fleet off the dangerous promontory of Athos. Mardonius was wounded and the failure of his expedition damaged his reputation. To enable both kinds of injury to recover, the Great King relieved him of his command.
Darius was not easily put off, and determined on a new expedition against the Greeks. He was egged on by Hippias, former tyrant of Athens. He was an old man now, but still yearned for his native city. He not only wanted to be restored to power, but also to die and be buried at home. Sigeum was an uncomfortable bolt-hole, for the people of Lesbos objected to émigré Athenians in their neighborhood. So he decamped to the Persian court, where he pressed the king to hurry up and punish Athens, and reinstall his rule.
In 491 the Great King decided to test which of the mainland Greek states would side with him or, as the term went, would “medize” (that is, favor the Persians, whom the Greeks sometimes called Medes). He sent envoys demanding earth and water, a well-known token of submission. In some quarters they received dusty answers: the Athenians threw the Persians into a pit as they did to common criminals and the Spartans pushed them down a well. If they wanted earth and water that was where they could find them. These were serious breaches of international custom and practice, according to which ambassadors were sacrosanct.
This time Darius sent his fleet, with a complete army on board, straight across the Mediterranean rather than getting it to hug the northern coastline and having the soldiers march alongside it, as Mardonius had done. He announced that sacred Delos would be spared from the Great King’s wrath, but, soon after the Persians had sailed past, an earthquake shook the island. Many regarded this as a portent of future woes.
—
The imminent threat from the east blew the flames of a local crisis, during which we meet again the ambitious, but eccentric, King Cleomenes of Sparta and witness his last hurrah.
The relations between Athens and the neighboring island of Aegina, a wealthy trading nation despite its small size and population, were and always had been chronically bad. Separated by only a few miles of water, they competed for the same trade and sooner or later one of them would have to give way. In 498 Aegina entered a state of “standing war.” Her fleet sailed along the Attic coast making mischief and raided Phaleron. This was the original port of Athens, although it was more of an unprotected beach than a proper harbor, and so was easy for enemies (and the weather) to attack.
It seemed likely that the island polis would take the side of Persia when its fleet and army arrived. Indeed, it had not hesitated to offer earth and water to the Great King’s embassy when it called. What could suit it better than the final humiliation of its old enemy?
The prestige of the Spartans was rising and they were widely recognized as an informal international ombudsman. So the Athenians filed a complaint with them that Aegina was medizing. It was willing, they claimed, to betray Hellas because of its quarrel with Athens. The islanders intended to march with the invaders.
Apparently on his own initiative, King Cleomenes went to Aegina and tried to arrest some leading Aeginetans, but was repulsed. He was not known for his approval of the Athenian democracy and people whispered he had been bribed to give way. Back in Sparta, his fellow-king Demaratus, with whom he was still on very bad terms, briefed against him.
Cleomenes put a stop to his colleague’s constant sniping. A suit was launched to depose Demaratus on the grounds that he was illegitimate. The oracle at Delphi was consulted and it seems that the priestess was secretly persuaded to find against Demaratus, who fled his homeland and made his way, like Hippias before him, to the court of King Darius, who welcomed him with open arms and gave him land and cities. In effect, he was appointed as a satrap.