Persian Vengeance against Athens
King Darius was doubly furious when he learned that the Athenians had aided the
Ionian revolt: not only had they dared attack his kingdom, they had done so after
earlier
having offered him earth and water1, thereby signifying—in the king's eyes—their submission to
him in order to secure an alliance. Insignificant though Athens was in his opinion
because its resources were so puny compared to those of his kingdom, Darius vowed to
exact vengeance from Athens as punishment for its disloyalty to him. The Greeks later
claimed that, to keep himself from forgetting his vow in the press of all his other
concerns, Darius ordered one of his slaves to say to him three times at every meal,
“Sire, remember the Athenians.” 2 In 490 B.C.
Darius dispatched a flotilla of ships3 carrying troops to attack the disloyal Greeks.
After burning Eretria4, the
city-state on the island of Euboea whose troops had joined those of Athens in the
attack on Sardis,
the Persian expedition landed on the northeastern coast of
Attica near a village called Marathon5. The
Persians had brought with them the
elderly Hippias6, the son of the former tyrant of Athens named Pisistratus. Hippias had himself
been tyrant of Athens until he was forced into exile in 510 B.C. by an Athenian
democratic uprising backed by Spartan military force. The Persians expected to
reinstall Hippias as tyrant of Athens under their sway, in similar fashion to the
tyrannies they had once installed in Ionian city-states. Since the Persian troops at
Marathon outnumbered the citizen militia of Athenian
hoplites7 (heavily armored infantry men
armed with spears and swords, the principal component of Greek land armies), the
Athenians asked the Spartans and other Greek city-states for military help.
The
Athenian courier dispatched to Sparta8 became famous because he ran the hundred and forty miles from Athens to Sparta
in less than two days. By the time the battle of Marathon took place, however, the
only allied troops to arrive were a
contingent from the small, nearby city-state
of Plataea9.
