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