Meanwhile, Cleomenes was able to get hold of his hostages and ten Aeginetans were dispatched to Athens for safekeeping. However, his troubles had only begun. It leaked out that he had tampered with the Pythia at Delphi and to evade punishment he escaped to Arcadia where he encouraged dissidents to rise against Spartan rule in the Peloponnese. The authorities were frightened at the damage he might do on the loose to Spartan interests and decided that the wisest course was to forget and forgive. He was recalled and resumed his functions as king.
According to Herodotus, about 490 Cleomenes lost his mind. In modern terms, he seems to have suffered a paranoid episode. For his own and other people’s safety, his family confined him to a wooden pillory, but he persuaded an unwary guard to give him a knife. He
started to mutilate himself, beginning from his shins. Cutting his flesh lengthways, he went on to his thighs, hips and sides until he reached his belly, which he thoroughly shredded.
So died one of Sparta’s larger-than-life statesmen. Cleomenes was charismatic, persuasive, and outward-looking, but also impatient and impulsive. Despite the misgivings of his countrymen, his policy was to exploit Sparta’s growing prestige and give his native land an international role. If he had lived longer he might have led the resistance to Persian aggression.
—
Marathon was a good place for sailing craft to land and soldiers to jump out of troopships drawn up along the shelving beach. That was the advice which Hippias gave the two Persian commanders, the Great King’s brother Artaphernes and Datis, an admiral from Media. The old tyrant was sailing with the fleet and hoped that his new friends would give Athens back to him.
The word “Marathon” means full of fennel plants. The flat, sickle-shaped plain, more than five miles long, will have been aflame with their yellow flowers and feathery leaves as they blossomed among clumps of trees and scrub. It lies between craggy mountains and the sea along the northeastern coastline of Attica. At its northern end a thin spit about one mile long, called Cynosura, or Dog’s Tail, jutted into the sea and a marsh took up half the plain, which was bisected by a torrent that regularly flooded the whole area. A village lay a mile or so inland and upland from the plain. A road ran from a little port called Rhamnus some miles to the north, down through the plain and onwards to Athens.
In early August 490, the Persians arrived at Marathon, which was completely undefended, after a safe journey across the Aegean. Before landing there, they had spent a week on the nearby island of Euboea, laying siege to the town of Eretria. Eventually it was betrayed by a couple of leading citizens. As Darius had instructed, the temples were torched in reprisal for Sardis and the people were enslaved. They were settled in the eastern Persian Empire not far from Susa and an oil well that was exploited for bitumen, salt, and oil (Herodotus found them years later, still speaking Greek). The expeditionary force waited for some days doing nothing; this was to give the Athenians time to consider their position.
It has been estimated that Datis and Artaphernes commanded an army of some 25,000 men. Their total number, including oarsmen and backup staff in charge of logistics, probably reached about 80,000 souls in all. Four hundred merchantmen were needed to transport the military. The Phoenicians, the best sailors of their day, supplied most of the Great King’s warships.
During daylight hours the Persian fleet beached at a safe spot between the large marsh and the Dog’s Tail. They disembarked and made camp, probably across the road running down from Rhamnus where there was an abundant spring. It was a secure position with minimal access from all directions and with an easy line of retreat to the sea.
Datis and Artaphernes had every reason for feeling pleased with themselves. They had not only met their first objective, the destruction of Eretria, but were well on their way to achieving their second. They had established themselves in strength on the soil of Attica. Their next and final goal was Athens, which was only twenty-six miles or a day’s march away. They would flick aside any armed opposition that might present itself en route, as with a fly whisk. They would then sack the city and burn to the ground its temples on the Acropolis.
As twilight came on, from high on the mountainside overlooking the plain of Marathon, someone lit a beacon. It gave watchers in Athens the alarming news that the Persians had landed.
—
How was the city to react? It was clearly the underdog and needed to think of some way of turning the tables. It could only muster a total of nine thousand hoplites, less than half the number of invaders. What is more, Athens had neither cavalry nor archers, whereas the Persians are estimated to have brought with them about one thousand horsemen and a detachment of bowmen. Cavalry was primarily trained to fight other cavalry, but could do a great deal of damage on the flanks of an infantry phalanx. In Greece, only the rich could afford horses and cavalry was identified with the aristocracy; it would be no surprise if the new democracy preferred, even if a little unwisely, to place its trust exclusively in its citizen hoplites.
Military command was in the hands of ten equal generals, as Cleisthenes had ordained, and Callimachus, the polemarch, or “war chief.” This offered the unappealing prospect of conducting a war by committee. The most battle-hardened of these commanders was Miltiades, scion of the wealthy and powerful aristocratic clan, the Philaids.
It was his uncle and namesake who had led some Athenian settlers in the days of Pisistratus to the Thracian Chersonese at the invitation of a local tribe and established a tyranny there. Miltiades’ father, Cimon, famously won the four-horse chariot race at the Olympic Games three times in a row, a feat achieved only by one other sponsor. He dedicated one of his victories to Pisistratus, who gratefully allowed him back to Athens from exile. But Pisistratus’s sons, Hippias and Hipparchus, evidently neither liked nor trusted him and had him murdered; assassins waited for him one night near the Town Hall, the Bouleterion, and ambushed him. Cimon was buried outside one of the city gates beside the grave of his victorious mares.
In about 524 Miltiades went out to recover the family domain, which had fallen back into Thracian hands. He became a vassal of the Great King and took part in Darius’s Thracian campaign. However, his loyalty was skin-deep, and he apparently joined the Ionian Revolt, during which he won control of the volcanic island of Lemnos (nicknamed the “smithy of Hephaestus,” god of fire and crafts). He brought Athenian settlers to live there and, in effect, made the island and its small neighbor Imbros an Athenian possession.
After the suppression of the revolt, Miltiades thought it wise to avoid the ire of Darius and sailed back to Athens. With his military experience and his knowledge of Persian ways, he was an obvious candidate for high military command in the present emergency. But being an aristocrat he had enemies in democratic Athens, who prosecuted him for having run a tyranny over Athenian citizens in the Chersonese. He was acquitted. This was lucky for two reasons. He was in fact guilty as charged and, if convicted, he could never have been elected general.
Callimachus understood that the war would not be won under the command of eleven decision makers, and he had only a modest opinion of his own capabilities. After all, as one of the Archons, he had been appointed by lot. At his suggestion his fellow-commanders agreed to give up their day of command, which they held in rotation one after the other, to Miltiades.
But what strategy should be adopted? In the interval following the terrible news from Eretria, the ecclesia debated the question probably more than once. One option was to hunker down behind the city walls and hope to survive a siege. Alternatively, the hoplites could wait for the enemy to approach and fight a battle in front of the walls. These two options smelled of pessimism and defeat. A third, bolder course was to go out and look for the enemy. A central aim should be to contain the beachhead, wherever the Persians were to land. This was the policy of Miltiades and he persuaded the demos that he was right. At a crucial meeting of the assembly he proposed that the city’s hoplites “provide themselves with rations, set out,” and “meet the enemy at once.” It was also agreed that a number of slaves should be given their freedom so that they could fight the Persians.