ambition to occupy Greece, but they were there and had to be reckoned with. All Greek states we know of were divided about their response. In some the majority, in power if not in numbers, felt that an offer
of compliance or even subservience was the more profitable course; others thought that they should fight; in every case there was domestic disagreement, and in every case it was easy for domestic
disagreements on other issues to become entangled with the Persian question. A political loser might look to Persia for support, even a political winner could feel more secure with Persian favour. So the
surviving exiled son of Pisistratus found sanctuary in Persian territory, and the most powerful family in northern Thessaly, the Aleuadae, lent towards collaboration. It was no different in Sparta. Although for
long aware of the problem she resolutely and consistently refused to become involved, but in the end even there a quarrel between the two kings in the late 490s drove one of the disputants, Demaratus, to the
Persian court.
Demaratus' opponent, Cleomenes, was clever, over-clever. He was also devious, unscrupulous, ambitious, cruel, and, it was believed, mad. There is no reason to think that this belief was wrong. At any rate,
forceful though he was, ingenious though he was, most of Cleomenes' schemes turned sour (in a fit of ultimate despair and lunacy he committed suicide). Yet, paradoxically, his failures strengthened Sparta.
The alliances we have mentioned were between city and city, but the standard formula of a Greek alliance, 'to have the same friends and the same enemies', raised a problem; who was to decide who was whose
friend, who was whose enemy? Between Sparta and a tiny community in Arcadia the question was academic; between Sparta and a state such as Corinth it was more delicate; between Sparta and the host of
entities large and small to whom she was now allied it was unanswerable. Consequently the system of separate associations, one with one, had to be modified. Gradually or suddenly the idea of a league of states
was created or recreated. Sparta was the military commander and effective mistress, but others had a voice. Perhaps they looked back to those other associations we have mentioned. In what must have been a
very hazy process one moment stands out. In about 506 Demaratus, supported by the Corinthians and other allies, refused to follow Cleomenes in an attack on Athens (his first interventions had not gone well).
Thereafter the 'Peloponnesian League' met in congress and acted only after debate and vote. Sparta provided the military expertise; the rest gave support. And so was created the military organization on which
was based the Greek resistance to Persia -when in the end Persia decided to invade.
The Persian Wars
In about 500 B.C. Sparta was the recognized leader of an alliance which embraced virtually all states of the Peloponnese except Argos; neither she nor her allies had shown any commitment on the Persian issue,
though she had inadvertently acted against some who found Persians sympathetic. Athens was free of her tyrants, and Athenians were slowly growing to appreciate the 'democratic' constitution that Cleisthenes
had invented (it is to be remembered that the word 'democracy' itself had not yet been invented). They had no unanimous view on Persia. Other states were similarly divided, and Herodotus sums it up, cynically
but effectively, when he says of the decision of the men of Phocis, a small community in central Greece, to fight: 'My guess is that they did so because they hated the Thessalians. If the Thessalians had chosen
to resist the Persians, the Phocians, I think, would have collaborated.'
The first serious trouble showed itself in Asia Minor. There, in the city of Miletus, a Persian-installed tyrant, Histiaeus, who had been adopted as political adviser at the Persian court, and his deputy,
Aristagoras, whom he had left behind to look after affairs in Miletus, found themselves at loggerheads with the official Persian authorities. They had believed that they could insinuate themselves into a role of
authority; they were wrong, and their machinations produced what later historians have described as a great patriotic outburst, Greek against barbarian, what Herodotus more soberly calls 'the beginning of
troubles'. In 499 some (not all) of the Ionian cities, some (not all) of the Aeolian states to the north, perhaps some of the Dorian cities to the south disposed of their tyrants and began open revolt against the
Persians. Sparta refused to help. Athens chose-hesitantly, but with irrevocable results-to support the rebels.
So Athens was to be punished, and in 490, after the Ionians and their friends had been squashed in 494, a Persian fleet crossed the Aegean to land on Attic soil at Marathon. Their number is not known, but it
was vastly larger than the 10,000 hoplites that Athens and one small friend, Plataea, could put into the field against them. Persians, it is to be remembered, were good soldiers and were commanded by able
generals. Yet, miraculously, the Athenians won. More than 6,000 Persians died; some 200 Greeks. The results were many. We note three.