During the peace settlements the Persians returned to their usual leniency. They reduced the cities’ tributes and allowed democratic governments. The revolt, however, had made Darius aware of Athens for the first time and he conceived the idea of the conquest of mainland Greece.
In 492 BC Darius dispatched an army under his son-in-law Mardonius (d.479 BC) across the Hellespont to re-establish Persian supremacy. His fleet captured Thasos while his army marched through Thrace and received the submission of Macedonia from Amyntas’ successor Alexander-I (r.c.498-454 BC). When his navy tried to round the promontory of Mount Athos, the easternmost ‘leg’ of the Chalcidice Peninsula, a large part of his fleet was destroyed by a violent storm. While in Macedonia with his army the Thracian Brygi attacked the Persian camp and Mardonius was wounded. The attack was called off and Mardonius had to return to Asia.
In 491 BC Darius sent envoys to Greece to demand from the cities earth and water (land and sea), the symbols of submission. Athens and Sparta rejected Persia’s demand. But fearing the military might of Persia, many of the other cities submitted, including the island of Aegina, which was at war with Athens, immediately opposite Athens’ port of Piraeus.
Aegina’s hostility with Athens had flared in the late 500s BC when the two states became trade rivals; and Athens feared Aegina’s navy, the largest in Greece at that time (≈700 ships). One reason for the early return of Athenian ships from the revolt may have been the need to defend the Attic coast from the Aeginetans. Athens appealed to Sparta to coerce Aegina.
Sparta’s dominance of southern Greece was virtually confirmed in 494 BC when Cleomenes utterly destroyed the Argive army in a decisive action at Sepeia, near Tiryns at the head of the Gulf of Argolis. When Cleomenes attempted to prevent Aegina from assisting the Persians, he was frustrated by his colleague Demaratus (r.c.515-c.491 BC). Cleomenes persuaded the Delphic Oracle to declare Demaratus illegitimate, had him deposed, and then went with his new colleague Leotychidas (c.76; r.491-476; d.469 BC) to Aegina to take ten of its leading men as hostages.
It was during these years that Themistocles (c.524-459 BC), a populist, having the support of lower class Athenians, rose to prominence in Athenian politics. He believed the key to Athens’ power was at sea. While serving as archon (493/2 BC) he drew up plans for the fortification of Piraeus.
Miltiades the Younger appears to have joined the revolt and it was possibly then that he won control of Lemnos. When the revolt was crushed he was forced to flee to Athens, and was prosecuted for having held tyrannical power in the Chersonese. He was acquitted and elected one of the ten strategoi (‘generals’), one from each tribe, for the year 490-489 BC.
In 490 BC Darius mounted his second invasion of Greece, this time commanded by his nephew Artaphernes and a Median noble, Datis. The invasion fleet sailed from Cilicia westwards to the Cyclades. The Persians took Naxos and proceeded from island to island until they reached Euboea. Eretria fell to treachery after a six-day siege. The fleet then sailed west and made landfall in the Bay of Marathon, some thirty kilometres northeast of Athens. The Persians were guided to the site by the deposed Athenian tyrant Hippias as a spot particularly suitable for cavalry, a military arm in which the Persians had an overwhelming superiority.
News of the fall of Eretria brought a fierce debate in Athens. Some wanted to simply prepare for a siege; others, notably Miltiades, urged that the army be sent out to fight. It is said that Miltiades pointed out that allowing the siege would cut Athens off from Sparta and increase the chances of treachery. The Athenian force numbered some 10,000 hoplites; the little city-state of Plataea sent as many as 1000 hoplites. The Athenian commander-in-chief was the polemarch (‘war archon’) Callimachus. Each of the ten tribes had its own strategos (‘general’), and Miltiades was only one of them. The Athenian runner Phidippides reported that Sparta could not send troops for several days until a religious festival was over.
The Athenians occupied the high ground in a position to block a Persian advance towards Athens, and started to fell trees to inhibit the Persian cavalry – the Persians had cavalry and archers, whereas the Greeks had neither. For several days the two armies simply sat in place, some three kilometres apart: the Athenians waiting for the Spartans to arrive, and the Persians waiting for conspirators to seize Athens.
Receiving no word from pro-Persian conspirators in Athens the Persians evidently decided to send the bulk of their fleet to Phalerum Bay together with a substantial land force, including the cavalry, leaving behind a land force of perhaps 15,000 men. When Ionian deserters got word to the Greeks that the Persian cavalry had departed, the strategoi were evenly split but Miltiades convinced Callimachus that the Athenians had to attack swiftly, defeat the Persian land force, and then march to the relief of Athens before the other Persian force could disembark.
Miltiades knew that the Persians put their best troops in the middle. He thinned his centre and reinforced his wings. At dawn the Greek line advanced across the plain. When they were 150-200 metres away and within the bow range of the Persian archers, they charged to minimise the time of their exposure to the arrow attack. The bowmen, after getting just a few arrows off, had to seek safety behind the Persian infantry, which then easily threw back the Greek centre. The heavy Greek flanks now drove in the lighter Persian flanks, compressing the Persians in a double envelopment. The Persian line now collapsed and the troops fled for the beach and their transports. Herodotus claims that 6400 Persians were killed for the loss of only 192 Greeks, including Callimachus on the right wing. The Greeks also captured seven Persian ships.
Miltiades sent word of the Greek victory to Athens by a runner, later said to be Phidippides, on the first Marathon run. Knowing that the Persian fleet was heading for Athens, a contingent was left to guard the prisoners and the rest of the Greek army marched rapidly back to Athens. According to Herodotus, someone in the city flashed the Persians a signal with a shield telling them to come on, but the Athenian force got there first. So Datis took the whole fleet back to Asia, and for the time being the danger was over.
In 489 BC Miltiades asked for and was granted a seventy-ship fleet and went to seize Paros, a wealthy Greek island that had submitted to the Persians. But the attack failed and Miltiades, with a badly injured leg, returned to Athens where he was impeached ‘for having deceived the people’ and having wasted public money. The prosecution was led by Xanthippus (c.520-475 BC), an aristocrat of the Athenian Buzygae family, married to Cleisthenes’ niece Agariste. Miltiades was tried and convicted by the Assembly and fined a ruinous fifty talents. Miltiades soon died from his gangrenous injury, and the fine was paid by his son Cimon (c.510-450 BC).Darius’ preparations for a new expedition against Greece were delayed in 487 BC when Egypt rose in revolt. Although Darius died the following year, his son Xerxes-I (c.54; r.486-465 BC) quelled the revolt in 485 BC and then continued with his father’s plan for the attack on Greece.
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