The Spark

The Persian Wars did not begin with an invasion of Greece. They began with a failed revolution in Ionia — the Greek cities of western Anatolia that had been absorbed into the Persian Empire after Cyrus the Great's conquests a generation earlier. The Ionians were not enslaved; many of their cities were prosperous and their cultures flourished under relatively light Persian rule. But they chafed under the Persian practice of installing local tyrants rather than allowing self-governance, and when the tyrant of Miletus, Aristagoras, faced a military humiliation he had personally caused, he wrapped his self-interest in the language of Greek freedom.

Aristagoras resigned his own tyranny in 499 BC and traveled to mainland Greece seeking allies for an anti-Persian revolt. Sparta's king Cleomenes famously threw him out after seeing a map and realising Persia's capital Susa was three months' march from the sea — too far for Sparta to help. Athens agreed to send twenty ships. Eretria sent five more. It was, Herodotus wrote drily, 'the beginning of troubles for both Greeks and barbarians.' Those twenty-five ships would ultimately cost tens of thousands of lives and half a century of warfare.

The revolt achieved one spectacular success: the Ionians marched inland and burned Sardis, the Persian satrapal capital of western Anatolia. Darius I, the King of Kings, was furious. Ancient sources claim that when told of the burning of Sardis, he asked who the Athenians were — not knowing the name of this minor city-state on the edge of the Persian world. On learning, he reputedly had a servant stand behind him at dinner every day and say three times: 'Master, remember the Athenians.' He would spend the rest of his life trying to fulfil that vow.

The Ionian Revolt sputtered on for six years. Persian resources were vast; Ionian unity was fragile. At the naval Battle of Lade in 494 BC, the Ionian fleet was betrayed by defections and shattered. Miletus, the revolt's heart, was besieged, stormed, and its population either killed or deported to the mouth of the Tigris River in Mesopotamia. The great temple of Apollo at Didyma was burned. Athens received a bill it had not expected to pay — and Darius intended to collect.