Makers of Ancient Strategy: From the Persian Wars to the Fall of Rome by Victor Davis Hanson Read Free Book Online

cavalierly to tweak, for nothing could have been more calculated
    to rouse the fury of the most powerful man on the planet. To Darius,
    of course, it went without saying that the Ionian insurgency needed
    urgently to be suppressed, and that the terrorist state beyond the Ae-
    gean had to be neutralized if the northwestern flank of the empire
    were ever to be rendered fully secure. The longer the punishment of
    Athens was delayed, the greater was the risk that similar nests of rebels
    might proliferate throughout the mountainous and inaccessible wilds
    of Greece—a nightmare prospect for any Persian strategist. Geopoli-
    tics, however, was far from the only prompting at the back of the Great
    King’s mind. Stronghold of terrorists Athens might be, but it had also
    stood revealed as a peculiarly viperous stronghold of the Lie. It was for
    the good of the cosmos, then, as well as for the future stability of Ionia
    that Darius began to contemplate carrying his divinely appointed mis-
    sion, his war on terror, to Attica. Staging post in a necessary new phase
    of imperial expansion and a blow struck against the demonic foes of
    Ahura Mazda: the burning of Athens promised to be both.
    Yet if the Athenians had little understanding of the motives and ide-
    als of the superpower that was now ranged against them, the Persians
    in turn were fatally ignorant of what they faced in the democracy. To
    the strategists entrusted with the suppression of the Ionian revolt,
    there seemed nothing exceptional about the new form of government;
    if anything, it seemed only to have intensified the factionalism that for
    so long had made fighting the Yauna akin to shooting fish in a barrel.
    From Persia with Love 23
    In 494, in a climactic confrontation off the tiny island of Lade, it was
    Persia’s spymasters as much as its admirals, and its bribes as much as
    its battleships, that served to provoke the final disintegration of the Io-
    nian insurgency. Four years on, and the preparations for an expedition
    against Athens reflected the same core presumption: that rival factions
    were bound to end up dooming the city’s resistance. It was no coin-
    cidence, for instance, that Datis, the commander of the Persian task
    force, should have been a veteran of the Ionian revolt, a general with
    such a specialist’s understanding of how the Yauna functioned that he
    could actually speak a few words of Greek. Also on the expedition, and
    whispering honeyed reassurances into Datis’s ear as to the welcome
    that he was bound to receive, was Hippias, the toppled Pisistratid, evi-
    dence of the Persians’ perennial obsession with securing the collabo-
    ration of native elites. Yet on this occasion, as events were to prove,
    they had miscalculated—and fatally so. For their intelligence was worse
    than useless; it was out of date.
    The Athenian army that confronted the invaders on the plain of
    Marathon, blocking the road that led to their city some twenty miles
    to the south, did not, as the Ionian fleet at Lade had, disintegrate. True,
    Athens had long been perfervid with rumors of fifth columnists and
    profiteers from the Great King’s gold, but it was precisely the Athenians’
    awareness of the consequent peril that had prompted them to march
    out from behind their city’s walls in the first place. During a siege, af-
    ter all, there would have been no lack of opportunity for traitors to
    open the gates, but out on the field of battle, where the Greek style of
    fighting, warriors advancing side by side in a phalanx, meant that all
    had to fight as one or else be wiped out, anyone who wished to live,
    even a would-be traitor, had no option but to handle his spear and hold
    his shield for the good of all. The battle line at Marathon, in short,
    could not be bought. It was to the credit of Datis that he eventually
    came to recognize this, but still he would not abandon his conviction
    that every Greek city ultimately had its price. In due course, after