The victory of Marathon greatly increased the reputation of the man to whose strategy the success was due. If the dispositions before and during the battle are to be taken as a criterion of Miltiades’ military capacity, he must be given the highest place among those who led Greek troops in the land warfare of this century. Never, indeed, until Leuktra, did any Greek general display such ability for command; and it may even be doubted whether the genius shown by Epaminondas in his dispositions for that battle was superior to that of Miltiades in dealing with the infinitely more complicated political and strategical situation of the year 490.

He was now at the zenith of his reputation. The decline was fated to be rapid. It was a feature in his life’s history which Herodotus could not fail to emphasize. The greatness, the suddenness of the fall seemed to illustrate in the most marked manner the uncertainty of human fortune.

By predilection Herodotus was almost as much a philosopher as an historian. He was not satisfied with merely recording facts; he wished to point their moral; and, consequently, in those cases in which a story exemplifies in the concrete some important article of his philosophical creed, he displays a tendency to emphasize that side, and those features of it which have the most direct bearing on the moral which he wishes it to convey. The relief of his picture aims rather at philosophical than at historical effect.

It is so with his tale of the closing incident of Miltiades’ career. The striking reverse of fortune needed, indeed, no emphasizing. The catastrophe was sufficiently marked to point its moral even to the dullest intelligence. But the feature of the story which the world might fail to notice unless it were brought into high relief was the self-incurred nature of the disaster. It is characteristic of his philosophy that he regards Fate as acting on mortals internally rather than externally, making them the instruments of their own doom. The “agent provocateur” appears late on the stage. In the opening scene the victim is himself the instrument of Fate.

This faith of his dominates his narrative of Miltiades’ disastrous expedition against Paros. The man is alone responsible for the design. His folly and impiety cause its failure. Like many another prominent character who appears upon the stage of his history, he is one under a doom. The circumstances outside his own personal action which must have contributed so largely to the final catastrophe, are hardly apparent in the story.

“After the defeat [of the Persians] at Marathon, Miltiades, who had previously enjoyed a great reputation at Athens, acquired a still greater fame.

“He asked the Athenians to grant him seventy ships, together with an army and money supplies, without telling them what land he proposed to attack, but saying that, if they followed him, he would make them rich.

“Such was his pretext for the demand of the ships. The Athenians, elated by his promises, granted them. H. vi. 133. After taking over his forces, Miltiades sailed against Paros, on the pretext that the Parians had been the aggressors in sending a trireme to Marathon with the Persian. This was his alleged reason; but he had a grudge against the Parians on account of Lysagoras, son of Tisias, a Parian by birth, who had prejudiced Hydarnes the Persian against him. On arriving at the object of attack, Miltiades with his force besieged the Parians, who were shut up within their fortifications; and, sending in a messenger, he demanded a hundred talents, saying that if they did not give it him, he would not withdraw his army until he had destroyed them.”

The Parians refused the money, and took measures for the defence.

So far, says Herodotus, the story is a pan-Hellenic one: but as to what ensued, several versions were current. He only gives the Parian tale. For the purposes of history all that is important in it is that a certain Timo, priestess of Ceres Thesmophora, arranged to disclose to Miltiades a way by which the city might be captured. In leaving the temple he fell and dislocated his thigh.

“Miltiades, therefore, being in evil plight, sailed back home, neither bringing money to the Athenians, nor having acquired Paros, but having besieged it for six and twenty days and laid waste the island.”86

There is an important sequel to the story. The Parians consulted the oracle at Delphi as to whether they should punish the priestess.

“But the Pythian would not allow it, saying that Timo was not blameable for this, ‘but that it was fated that Miltiades should not end well, and that she had appeared to him as a guide to misfortunes.’”

The most striking point in the tale of this expedition to Paros is the absence of adequate motive in the story as it stands. In addition to this, it contains certain improbable details.

It is unlikely that the Athenians would entrust an expedition of this size to either Miltiades or any one else, without knowing the object of the expedition. Seventy ships would constitute nearly the whole of the Athenian fleet of this time.

The authorities at Athens must have been well aware from the beginning that Paros was the object of attack.

Of the date of the expedition there is no indication given in the story except that Herodotus’ language implies a certain interval between Marathon and its departure, during which Miltiades enjoyed a higher reputation than before. It can hardly have been in the same year as Marathon; and it cannot therefore be placed earlier than the spring of 489 B.C. Its motive may have been either commercial or strategic; but in either case it aimed at the acquisition of a strong footing on the islands which bridge the mid-Ægean. Naxos had certainly suffered in 490. It may even have remained in Persian occupation; and, if so, Paros was destined to become what Samos and Naxos had successively been in the past, the outpost of European Greek trade along this route.

Such must have been the real motive lying behind the pretext of the medism of Paros.

The expedition was certainly a failure; and, rightly or wrongly, Miltiades was made the scapegoat. The democrats welcomed the opportunity of revenging their defeat of 493; so Xanthippos led the accusers in their second political prosecution of the leader of the aristocratic party. The charge brought against him was a capital one. He himself was unable to conduct his own defence, for the injured thigh was mortifying, and his end was near. His friends who fought on his behalf succeeded so far that the penalty was reduced to a fine of fifty talents. He did not live to pay the fine; but his son Kimon, destined to become famous in the wars of twenty years later, paid it after his death.

The curiously composite nature of the sources of Herodotus’ history are well illustrated in those passages which relate to the career of Miltiades. Some originate in a source peculiarly favourable to him; others in one bitterly hostile. The Parian tale belongs conspicuously to the latter class.

He may have been by character, he certainly was by position, a man about whom his Athenian contemporaries would form strong opinions, whether good or evil. The leader of the aristocratic party at a period which, whatever the obscurity of the details of the political history of the time, was evidently one of fierce party contention, could not hope in such a state as Athens to escape the defamation of political opponents. Herodotus may or may not have ignored or toned down many of the stories; but the fact remains that the worst he has to say of him is not very bad, and even that is obviously intended to illustrate the infatuation of a doom.

The real features of Miltiades are blurred in the historical portrait. But, inasmuch as the most reliable part of the story is that which is most favourable to him, it may be that the modern world will judge most truly of him if it thinks of him at his best.

The extant history both of Greece and Persia during the years which intervened between the Marathonian campaign and the great invasion of 480 is very fragmentary; but, as it was Herodotus’ object to tell the tale of the relations between the two, such facts as he does mention have in nearly every instance a direct bearing on those relations, and the gaps in the story are not of the embarrassing character of those which are so apparent in the narrative of the years preceding the Ionian revolt, or, indeed, in that of the revolt itself.

The failure at Marathon made Darius more desirous than ever to prosecute his designs against Greece. In spite of the suppression of the Ionian revolt, the events of the last twenty-five years must have seriously shaken the prestige of Persia in the extreme western parts of his territory. Darius’ life-work remained unfinished if he could not consolidate this one corner of the great empire he had reconquered so rapidly in the first years of his reign. That consolidation was manifestly incomplete if the free kin of his turbulent subjects in the far west were to be allowed to enjoy the reputation of having defied his power.

He went to work slowly, for the task was great; and it was all to do, since Datis and Artaphernes had failed to establish a footing on the western mainland. Moreover, that expedition had shown him the difficulty, if not the impossibility of isolating the immediate object of attack. Pan-Hellenic sentiment may not at the time have been stronger west than east of the Ægean; but its practical expression, in the form of combination among the states, was infinitely easier on the European than on the Asiatic side. The years of the revolt had furnished him with all the data for an estimate of the formidable character of this sentimental factor in the politics of this western border of his empire. The punishment of the free Ionians, and the establishment of a tête-du-pont on the European shore, could only be accomplished by a force sufficiently large to meet a formidable combination among the Greek states.

In the years following Marathon,—the last years of his eventful life,—he set to work to prepare for the great expedition. The work was necessarily a work of time. Apart from the magnitude of the undertaking, the last ten years must have severely strained even the great resources of his empire. Moreover, those resources were, owing to the methods on which the government of the empire was organised, potential rather than active. Persia possessed the materials for a great army; but she did not keep that army in commission. Prompt action was impossible with her when the action was to be on a large scale.

Some years passed, and yet the blow did not fall on Greece. The exhausted state of the empire, apart from the habitual slowness in the working of its military machinery, must have delayed the progress of the preparations. H. vii. 2. Darius, too, was in the decline of his days; and it may well be that a failure in his health, apparent some years before his actual death, led to those quarrels about the succession, the story of which reached Greece, and is reproduced by Herodotus, after his custom, with much circumstantial detail. This failure of energy at the centre of the empire would entail a corresponding lack of energy in the outlying parts of it.

Whatever the progress made in the years immediately succeeding Marathon,87 an event took place in 486 which diverted the attention of Darius to another part of the world. Egypt revolted.

But the old king was dying; and before the work of suppressing the revolt was carried out, he passed away in 485.

Enough has been said about him in connection with his organization of the empire to make it unnecessary to write his obituary here.

Singularly able, singularly enlightened, and, for the time in which he lived, singularly humane, he stands forth in history as the greatest Oriental that ever ruled in Western Asia.

In the year after Darius died the revolt in Egypt was suppressed.

During the six years which followed the Marathonian campaign the march of events at Athens had been rapid.

The victory won by the democratic party in securing the condemnation of Miltiades (probably in 489) shows that, after Marathon, the finely balanced political scale had inclined in their direction.88 The full reasons for this change in the political situation are unknown, but the failure at Paros must have largely contributed to it, if it was not its main cause. But the democratic party which came into power somewhere towards the close of 489 was a very different party to that of two years earlier. Its Peisistratid leanings had been brought to a violent and sudden end by the events of 490, and tyranny and its attendant medism were for ever dead in Athens.

Still the fact that Aristides held an archonship in the official year 489–488, suggests that the triumph was a triumph of a moderate and not of an extreme democracy, the triumph of a party largely recruited from among the moderates who must have supported the aristocrats in their ascendency during the years preceding 490. This section would require no urging to a policy of “anti-tyrannis”; and it may well have been the case that the main body of the democrats, with eyes now opened to the real nature of that they had misjudged, were anxious, under the new order of things, to purge themselves of their past sins by the punishment of those who had led them astray.

In the year after Aristides’ archonship the law of ostracism was passed. It was immediately put in operation against the close friends of tyranny, three being sent into exile, among them Megakles the Alkmæonid. This in 488–487.

In the next year, the application of the lot to the selection of archons robbed those officials of much of their prestige, if not of their power.

Changed alike in sentiment and policy, the democracy of Athens developed in the years immediately following Marathon into that intensely patriotic party which contributed so largely to the salvation of Greece in the greater war which was soon to come.

It was probably in the latter half of the ten years’ interval that hostilities with Ægina broke out afresh. The two powers were still at enmity in 481, when the Greeks, in view of the great invasion which then so manifestly threatened them, sought to bring about a reconciliation between such of the Greek states as were at variance with one another.

Herodotus’ account of the relations between Athens and Ægina is very confused, so much so that it is difficult to allocate the various incidents which marked those relations even to their probable dates. Yet there is no reason to doubt the main fact that a serious struggle did take place between those states in this decade, and, probably, in the latter half of it.

In the history of the relations between Greece and Persia this war is of doubtful importance;—doubtful, because it is not known how far it played a part in bringing about one of the most momentous resolutions that the people of Athens ever took.

The great development of the silver coinage system about this time had made the demand for silver much greater than it had been previously. It was possibly owing to this cause that one of the lessees who held from the State silver mines at Laurion in South Attica, sought to increase the output by exploring deeper levels than had hitherto been worked. After sinking his shaft to a depth of 300 feet, he came upon lodes of ore infinitely richer than those at the higher levels, to which the workings had been hitherto confined.

The date generally attributed to this discovery and its results is 484 B.C. The income which the State derived from the mines increased so greatly, that it became a question at Athens what had best be done with the money.

This seems to have been about the time at which Themistocles, who was destined to play so great a part in the war of 480, came to the front in Athenian politics. He appears to have held high office some years before this time,89 but his predominating influence in Athens coincides with the last five years of this decade. H. vii. 144. When it was proposed that the money thus accruing to the State should be divided among the citizens, he urged that a better use should be made of it in building 200 vessels for the navy.

He carried the proposal. That is certain; but what is not certain is the nature of the motive which induced him to make it.

Herodotus, whose account of Themistocles is drawn from sources hostile to this great man and to that phase of home politics of which he was in this and succeeding years the chief exponent,90 attributes this proposal not to a wise foresight as to the plans of Persia, H. vii. 144. but to the immediate necessities of the war with Ægina.

But Plutarch in his life of Themistocles has preserved a fuller record of his policy in the years preceding the great war of 480, a record which bears all the traces of reliability, and gives a wholly different colouring to the circumstances of the time.

Themistocles’ policy with regard to naval matters was not suddenly sprung upon the world in the year 484 but dated from what must have been the very outset of his political career. Even before or immediately after the time of Marathon, he is advocating this policy in opposition to Miltiades.91

Many regarded Marathon as the end of the war, but he looked upon it as the beginning only.

Plutarch’s statement as to the early date at which Themistocles began to advocate the policy which was fated to render his name famous, has been received in later times with much suspicion, mainly on the ground of the general unreliability of that historian as a recorder of history. It is, indeed, frequently the case that his statements, unless supported by actual or presumptive external evidence, cannot be accepted as final. But in this particular instance the presumptive evidence strongly corroborates his story.

Up to 500 B.C. Persia as a naval power had not played any part in the Ægean. It seems, indeed, to have been during the Ionian revolt that she developed to the full this arm of her service. After Ladé, in 494 the Persian fleet in the Western seas becomes ever more prominent and more important. Islands previously unsubdued begin to fall one by one into her hands.

Was this a warning whose significance could have been misjudged by a Themistocles?

Until 484, however, the success of his advocacy of increase in the navy seems to have been but partial. But something had been done. The Athens, which some nine years before [about 498 B.C.] had been compelled to borrow ships from Corinth for use against Ægina, is able in 489 to despatch a fleet of seventy ships with Miltiades to Paros. It was, doubtless, on the question of expense, found impossible, in view of the then resources of the State, to build and maintain a large number of vessels.

The increase in the revenues from Laurion gave Themistocles and Athens the opportunity for so doing. Herodotus, as has been seen, alleges that Themistocles’ motive was the war with Ægina.

Plutarch, on the other hand, while saying that such was the object on the face of his proposal, adds that his real motive was to make preparations to meet the Persian.

To the people he used, in advocating his measure, that argument from the present which would appeal to them, knowing well that the argument from the future is not one which can be expected to move the feelings of the masses, who have not the means of gauging what the future will bring forth.

In this case again Plutarch’s account of the matter is supported by other evidence.

The number of ships demanded was much larger than could have been required for any war with Ægina. The Æginetan fleet may have suffered severely in this war, but Ægina could only commission forty-two vessels at the time of Salamis.

Nor can it have required a large amount of foresight on the part of any statesman who cared to study the question, to understand that another attack of Persia must come, and must come, too, at no remote period.

This measure must have been carried at Athens about the time when Xerxes is described to have been deliberating upon an attempt to conquer Greece.

Succeeding his father in 485, Xerxes found himself heir to an Egypt in revolt That revolt was suppressed in 484. The nature of the country made revolt in Egypt ever formidable, and hence such preparations as Darius had made for the invasion of Greece must have been to a certain extent expended on the campaign in Egypt.

Much of the work of the last years of Darius’ life would have to be done over again, if the great design of a conquest of the whole of European Greece was to be persisted in.

The personality of Xerxes is much distorted in the records of Greek historians. From Herodotus onward they with one consent aim at emphasizing the contrast between the superficial magnificence and the pitiful incapacity of the monarch who made so disastrous a failure in his attack on Greece. Judged, indeed, by his known acts, Xerxes appears to have been much less able and less energetic than his great predecessor.

He was at first, says Herodotus, in some doubt as to whether to carry out the design against Greece. He was, however, persuaded by Mardonius, who, wishing to be made governor of Greece, advised him from motives of self-interest.

It is obvious that Herodotus’ account of events which took place on the Persian side must be received with the utmost caution, since the occasions on which he could obtain anything resembling authentic information on such points must have been few and far between. This reported advice of Mardonius may be the mere creation of the fancy of Greek tradition, seeking to attribute to the man who dragged on the war to its disastrous close the responsibility for its inception. But it is, on the other hand, quite possible that Herodotus did have substantial evidence as to the part which Mardonius played in the matter.

No great advantage from an historical point of view can be gained by following the long account which Herodotus gives of the various influences which were brought to bear on Xerxes for and against the proposed expedition. H. vii. 6. Those persistent plotters against the freedom of Hellas, the Peisistratidæ, appear once more, this time with an oracle-monger in their train, a certain Onomakritos, who is represented as plying Xerxes with oracles favourable to the Persian prospects, while suppressing those which foretold disaster to the king.

A far more significant influence is that asserted to have been exercised by the Aleuadæ, whom Herodotus describes as “Kings in Thessaly.” This great feudal family from Larisa found itself in a very difficult and hazardous position. They were at the time supreme in this border-land; but it was a supremacy which was threatened by the fact that the Persian frontier had been advanced by Mardonius’ conquest of Macedonia to within a few miles of their own stronghold. Their Thessalian vassals were ofttimes inclined to kick against the pricks of a quasi-serfdom; and, furthermore, their rulers must have been in a position to gauge accurately the feeling that would be excited among them in the event of a Persian advance, and in case the Greeks farther south showed any disposition to aid them in resistance to that invasion which must come sooner or later.

The attitude of the Aleuadæ some few years later, at the time of the war, was indeed calculated to give rise in after-times to sinister reports as to their previous proceedings; but their position at this time between the upper millstone of Persia and the nether millstone of Greece was so uncomfortable, that they may well have sought to escape from it before the mill started working. It was a far cry to Peloponnese from the banks of the Peneius, and a supremacy in Thessaly under Persia was better than no supremacy at all. It is not strange, then, if, in their providence of the future, they made friends of the mammon of Persian unrighteousness.

It would flatter Greek conceit to think that their own renegade countrymen could have so much influence for evil with the Great King; and the part which these families of the Peisistratidæ and Aleuadæ are represented to have played in determining the great war was doubtless greatly exaggerated.

Apart from this motive for exaggeration, there was a tendency in after-times to antedate the medism of those who sided with the Persian in the war of 480.

Perhaps in the case of the Aleuadæ, however, later tradition may not have been wholly unjust. It would be natural that they should seek to make some arrangements with the great Power which was now at their very gates. It was to their interest to do so; but no motive of interest can be assigned to their reported advocacy of an invasion of Greece; and this part of the tradition preserved in Herodotus was probably a creation of the imagination of posterity.

The language attributed by Herodotus to Xerxes and his counsellors in the meeting at which the king announced his decision to undertake the expedition against Greece, though it cannot have any claim to an historical foundation, still less to historical accuracy, is interesting as expressing the Greek idea of the working of the Oriental mind.

Xerxes places before his council his reasons for undertaking the expedition. He must not, as a conqueror, fall short of his great predecessors. He must punish Athens, and, incidentally, conquer Greece. The Empire of Persia must be universal.

Mardonius then speaks on the same side. He urges that the Ionians in Europe must not remain free; a statement of an opinion which, whether uttered or not on this particular occasion, seems to have been an essential feature of the policy of those great Persian officials who had ruled in Western Asia for twenty-five years past.

There are other passages in the reported speech which are of the utmost interest. The acquisition of territory out of sheer lust of conquest is advocated, implying, to Greek minds, a marked and striking contrast to the utter absence of mere land-hunger in the Greek disposition.

Mardonius’ description of the methods of Greek warfare, how that “having found out the fairest and most level spot, they go down to it and fight,” is so apt that, though the words may never have been uttered by Mardonius himself, they represent possibly, a sarcastic criticism made by some Persian with whom Herodotus has spoken. The Persian could not understand the limitations which the nature of the land of Greece placed upon the methods of warfare of its inhabitants.

Finally, Mardonius urges that the Greek will be scared into submission by the mere numbers with which Persia can take the field.

Of all the members of the council only one is represented as having dared to oppose the scheme. This was Artabanos, son of Hystaspes, and uncle of Xerxes. He represents the “little Persian” side of contemporary politics.

He opens his speech with a passage which might have been culled from a drama of Euripides. He proceeds to point out with what disastrous results his warnings as to the “Scythian” expedition had been disregarded. He then gives a forecast of the war which, had it been made at this time, would have been singularly justified by events. After this he indulges in philosophical remarks peculiarly in accord with Herodotus’ own views, and winds up with an estimate of the Greeks peculiarly flattering to that people.

The retort of Xerxes is conceived in the typical form that an absolute monarch of the East might be expected to employ towards an adviser whose advice was unpalatable.

It is almost inevitable that at a time so momentous the supernatural should make its appearance in Herodotus’ history.

Xerxes’ resolution is shaken by Artabanos’ advice. He even decides to follow it, though warned in a dream not to change his resolution. The warning comes a second time. He consults Artabanos, and suggests that he should put on the royal apparel and sleep in the royal bed, and so make experiment whether the dream would come to him. To him also the vision comes; and he, too, is converted. So jealous are the gods of human greatness, and so persistent were they in leading the great king into disaster!

Having decided on the expedition, Xerxes proceeded with his preparations. Herodotus says that he took four whole years in making them, and that he began them immediately after suppressing the revolt of Egypt.

No useful end can be gained by following in detail through the pages of Herodotus the exaggerated estimate which the Greek formed of the magnitude of the expedition and of the preparations made for it. All that will be attempted here will be to show what, on a sober estimate of possibilities and probabilities, may be assumed to have been the actual facts of the case. The obvious exaggerations of the Greek estimate have led writers in modern times to what must be regarded as exaggerated depreciations of the magnitude of this supreme effort on the part of the great Empire.92

Whatever the obscurities of the detailed evidence, one reliable fact seems to stand forth: that this was an unusual effort on the part of Persia. The levy of troops for the expedition was certainly an extraordinary one.

Allowing for the Greek exaggeration of numbers, there is reason to suppose that the ordinary full levy of the Persian land forces produced an army of about half a million. It had been called out for the Scythian expedition, nearly twenty years before this time. This full levy was, however, rarely made, and only when circumstances imperatively demanded it. It is also noticeable that on such occasions the Great King assumes the command.

It is quite possible that the number of troops put into the field during the Ionian revolt amounted from beginning to end to numbers even exceeding those of the ordinary general levy; but it is a noticeable feature of that war that the Government at Susa carries it on by means of reinforcements despatched at various times. There is nothing of the nature of a single great levy.

It must be concluded that the troops employed on land in the campaign of 480 amounted to more than half a million.93

In Herodotus the numbers of the expedition run into millions. The exaggeration is so hopelessly great that it is impossible to draw any conclusion from the statements made.94

It is only when the historian deals with the relatively moderate dimensions of the force left behind with Mardonius in 479, which he says amounted to 300,000 men, that his evidence on this particular point becomes worthy of consideration. The numbers he gives of the Greek contingents at Platæa, derived apparently from some official information, amount altogether to over 100,000 men. It may be regarded as certain that Mardonius did not face the Greek on that occasion with an army in a less proportion than two to one to that of the enemy. If so, Herodotus’ statements must approximate to the truth. It is probable, too, that Mardonius retained with him a considerable fraction of the original land force, and this would be in general accord with an estimate of over half a million for the total numbers of the land army.95

The preparation and collection of such a force, drawn from every race in that extensive empire, would be necessarily a work of time; and, apart from this, the Orient does not work quickly. Whatever the faults committed in the war, the excellence of the organization on the Persian side must, in certain important respects, have been remarkable; and that organization cannot, for the purposes of an expedition of such magnitude, have been a brief work.

The exaggeration in Herodotus’ statement that the expedition took four years to prepare, may not, therefore, be very great. One deduction must be made. Egypt was not reduced until Darius had been dead a year, and therefore its reduction may fall late in 484; and, if so, the period of preparation cannot have greatly exceeded three years.

It was early in these years of preparation that labourers were sent to cut a canal through the low and narrow isthmus which connects Mount Athos with the mainland of Chalkidike. The disaster to Mardonius’ expedition in 492 had aroused within the Persian breast a dread of this formidable promontory.

The plan of the expedition was, indeed, a return to that of the expedition of 492. Marathon had shown the Persians that an attack on Greece, or even on Athens, in order to be successful, must be organized on a larger scale than any expedition which could be put on board a fleet The expedition of Mardonius had been successful as far as human agency was concerned; that of Datis and Artaphernes, though launched against an infinitely less formidable object of attack, had been a serious failure. The most natural way of accounting for the contrast would be the comparison of size.

While the canal at Athos was in process of construction, a bridge was being built over the Strymon river, and ropes were being prepared for the great bridges by which it was proposed to cross the Hellespont. Large depôts of provisions were also collected at various points on the intended route, at Leuké Akté in Thrace, at Tyrodiza in Perinthia, at Doriskos, at Eion, and in Macedonia.