The First Clash (13 page)

Pisistratus went through with the wedding, but it was a sham. Megacles may have had a notion that any male offspring of this marriage would succeed Pisistratus to power. If he did, he was soon to be disappointed, as Pisistratus already had two sons from a previous marriage, Hippias and Hipparchos, and he had no intention of damaging their interests in favor of a grandson of Megacles. Furthermore, it is quite possible that he did not want to damage the future of the Pisistratidae clan’s standing in Athenian society by the blood guilt that still clung to the Alcmaeonidae clan, of which Megacles was a member.

When Megacles learned that Pisistratus had no intention of giving him a grandson, he again made common cause with the Party of the Plains, and Pisistratus again went into exile. This time it was to last ten years. At this point, Pisistratus understood that if he was to regain power in Athens and hold it, he would require money and troops. For the next decade, Pisistratus dedicated his every effort to a relentless pursuit of both. At first, he found refuge and support in Macedonia, and from there he was able to extend his influence to the area around Mount Pangaeus in Thrace (now northern Greece), which possessed rich silver deposits. A superb politician, Pisistratus also began gathering allies throughout the Greek world, who sent him enough money to purchase influence in Attica and begin equipping a sizable mercenary force.
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When his preparations were near
completion, Argos sent him one thousand hoplites, and the tyrant of Naxos personally joined him with troops and money. In 546 BC, Pisistratus considered himself ready.
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From a base near the city of Eretria, Pisistratus crossed over the narrow strait to the Plain of Marathon. Here, his preparations and the continued cultivation of the loyalty of the hill people and Athens’s poor paid their expected dividends. They flocked to his banner, while the Athenian government found it was having trouble fielding an adequate force to resist the tyrant’s return. After a short delay, Pisistratus began his advance on Athens, twenty-six miles distant. At Pallene, barring his way, were the leaders of the Parties of the Coast and Plains, along with whatever forces they could assemble. Their army was apparently caught at leisure and failed to form before Pisistratus’s attack fell upon them. The Battle of Pallene was over in minutes as the routed defenders of Athens streamed back toward the city. Showing the cunning he was famous for, Pisistratus sent messengers after the fleeing Athenians, telling them that if they returned peaceably to their homes, they would be left secure and unmolested. Most Athenians, whose hearts were never in the fight, took him up on the offer. The road to Athens was clear, his enemies were in flight, and from those important families too slow to get away Pisistratus took hostages that he stored with his ally Naxos.

After two failures, Pisistratus’s tyranny finally took root, and he ruled for the next seventeen years. During that time, he took Athens from being a troubled, second-rate city and set it on the path to greatness. Despite his hold on absolute power, Pisistratus held the reins of power lightly, keeping all of Athens’s old institutions in place. To any observer the government of Athens was little changed, but now it was guided by the will of one man. The nearest parallel we have for this in the ancient world is Augustus’s rise to supreme power in Rome. He too kept the mechanisms of government virtually unchanged, including the dignity of the Roman Senate, but Augustus himself became the guiding force of all that was done.

As a first step, Pisistratus made sure that those who supported him during his long exile were properly rewarded. The great estates of the nobles were broken up and disbursed among the mass of common laborers. In this one act, Pisistratus created a yeoman class that would one day be available as hoplites in the Athenian battle line. It also stripped the nobles of the economic basis of their power, effectively crushing the power of the Party of the Plains for almost a generation. These new landowners were required
to pay a tenth of their produce in taxes, which must have seemed a light burden to men who had previously had nothing.

This revenue source probably became the backbone of the government’s finance, but it was far from its only revenue source. Pisistratus kept his hold on the silver mines he controlled in Thrace, and to this he added the silver from the Attic mines at Laurion, which started to be worked much more extensively from this point forward.
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This combined silver hoard was minted into a new Attic currency with a bust of Athena on one side and an owl on the other. The weight of these coins and their purity soon ensured they were in high demand. Moreover, their entry into the economic system in large quantities greatly improved Athenian trade and added to the prosperity of many who had previously supported the Party of the Coast, effectively bringing them into alliance with Pisistratus.

This was not all Pisistratus did to advance the Athenian economy. In a policy reminiscent of the first year of Darius’s reign, but maintained for a much longer period of time, Pisistratus spent liberally. He financed farmers and entered into an extensive building program, which had the added benefit of mopping up the remaining excess labor in Athens. Moreover, he began the process of transitioning Attica’s farmers from grain production to the growing of olives. The effects of these changes cannot be underestimated, as they had profound consequences for Athenian society and diplomacy and later in the decision to fight at Marathon.

Olives were a cash crop and brought substantially more revenues to farmers than grain. As Athens produced much more olive oil than could profitably be used in Attica, it was forced to begin trading with other cities. This trade, along with the introduction of new silver coinage, soon made Athens the greatest and richest trading city in Greece. However, the transition to olives as Athens’s cash crop was not without its downside. Foremost was that Athens was unable to grow the grain necessary to feed its growing population. Although there were several regions that produced excess grain, the farms around the Black Sea produced the greatest surplus. It was not long, therefore, before Attic traders were making regular trips to the Black Sea, a region that soon became critical to Athens’s survival. Because of this the Hellespont, the gateway to the Black Sea, became an area of strong Athenian strategic interest, and from this point forward we see increasing Athenian influence in the area, including a number of Athenians who became tyrants of cities in the area. Miltiades, an eventual hero of Marathon, was one of these.
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Another drawback of this agricultural
transformation was that olive trees are easily destroyed. This must have been a tremendous factor as the Athenians made the decision whether to hide behind their walls or go out to face the Persians at Marathon.
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This susceptibility of olive trees to destruction made it imperative that Athens remain at peace for a prolonged period, at least long enough for the city to become powerful enough to protect them. Therefore the policy of Pisistratus and his immediate successors became the maintenance of peace at almost any cost.

In total, the economic policies and reforms of Pisistratus greatly increased the wealth of Athens and its citizenry. While Athens was not yet the military and economic power that it would become in later decades, by the time of Marathon it was richer and more powerful than most historians credit. As most hoplites were required to purchase their own armor and weapons, the creation of a wealthier peasant class automatically increased the numbers available to fill the army rolls. Moreover, it was this rapid economic growth that made it possible for Athens, which at the start of Pisistratus’s reign had trouble defeating relatively insignificant Megara, to mobilize a force capable of defeating a large Persian army.

If protecting his economic miracle was not enough incentive to pursue a policy of being a good neighbor to all, Pisistratus’s own experience was enough to convince him that it was dangerous to allow enemies to accumulate too close to home. He owed his return to power to Eretria providing him a base, Macedon sheltering him, Thebes sending him money, Argos sending soldiers, and Naxos offering him substantial military and economic support. As the men he sent into exile, particularly the always dangerous Alcmaeonidae clan (Megacles and his brilliant son Cleisthenes), were consistently intriguing for their return, it was imperative that he maintain good relations with all his neighbors. The tenacity and capacity of these exiles were not to be despised, and Pisistratus made it his first order of business that they never found succor in the cities or regions near Attica.

This task was not easy. Megara still harbored ill feeling over the loss of Salamis; close relations with the militarily powerful Thessaly tended to anger Thebes, which was already growing wary of Athens’s growing strength; Aegina and Corinth became increasingly unfriendly as they continually found themselves on the losing side of expanding Athenian trade and industry; and finally, Pisistratus’s close relations with Sparta could not be long held while he remained friendly to Argos. The strain of balancing all of these diplomatic arrangements must have been tremendous, but during
his lifetime, Pisistratus was up to the task. Unfortunately for the legacy of his family, they proved unmanageable for his son and successor, Hippias.

Even though he maintained a policy of peace in the near abroad, on the other side of the Aegean, Pisistratus undertook a policy of imperialism. As we previously saw, this policy was propelled by the necessity to secure Athens’s access to grain, as more and more of Attica’s fertile land was transitioned to olive production. As a first step, Athens took the port city of Sigeum from the Mytilenians. This city was previously under Athenian control and was probably first seized during the war with Megara to hinder that city’s trade in the region. Herodotus does not tell us how or when it was lost to Mytilene, nor does he tell us when it was retaken. He does relate, however, that Pisistratus installed his illegitimate son (of an Argive woman) Hegesistratos as tyrant and that this led to a long, bitter war with Mytilene.

The capture of Sigeum gave Pisistratus control of the southern shore of the Dardanelles; however, to completely control access to the Black Sea, Athens needed to control the north shore also. Fortunately, this was accomplished early in Pisistratus’s tyranny. At the time, the Thracian tribe of the Dolonci controlled the Chersonese peninsula (the north shore of the Dardanelles) but were hard-pressed in a war with a tribe to the north, the Apsinthians. The Dolonci appealed to Athens for help, and Pisistratus was only too ready to agree and thereby extend Athenian influence into this strategic region. Pisistratus selected Miltiades (uncle of the Miltiades who would fight at Marathon), a leader among the powerful Philaidae clan, to take a force north and become the tyrant of the Chersonese, a position his family would hold until after the Ionian revolt.
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Upon his arrival, Miltiades won or otherwise ended the war, built a defensive wall across the Chersonese peninsula, and became a close ally of Lydia’s king Croesus. For Pisistratus, this single stroke removed a powerful potential rival from Attica, deprived what was left of the Party of the Plains of its leadership, and greatly enhanced Athenian power in a critical region.

A STATE CREATED FOR WAR

M
arathon would be, above all, a victory of Athenian arms. In fact, the advance guard of the most formidable military power in Greece—Sparta—did not arrive until the day after the battle. However, the truth is that in the decades prior to Marathon, Sparta played a decisive role in the development of Athens, both politically and militarily. Furthermore, in the two years just prior to the Persian assault, it was the actions of Sparta’s army that made Athens’s victory possible. In those two years, Sparta had all but annihilated the army of Argos, a city only sixty miles from Athens that was suspected of inviting Persian intervention in Greek affairs. Spartan arms also thoroughly cowed Athens’s perennial enemy Aegina, which was also leaning dangerously toward Persia. Spartan troops would miss the Battle of Marathon, but they set the conditions that kept Athens from having to fight on multiple fronts. It is therefore fair to state that Sparta, knowingly or not, saved Athens from destruction. However, their temporary friendship came only after decades of conflict.

Sparta was different from any other Greek city-state. As a state it was born in war, and for several centuries it existed only for war. Alone among the Greek city-states, Sparta, during the centuries of its greatness, never built a wall around the five villages that constituted its core.
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Modern historians are fond of stating that no walls were necessary, as Sparta was protected by the formidable Taygetus mountain chain, which rises nearly eight thousand feet at its peak. However, as all Greeks at the time understood, there was a far better reason Sparta lacked walls—its hoplites were the most formidable soldiers in the ancient world. Before it suffered crushing defeats against Thebes’s brilliant general Epaminondas at the
Battles of Leuctra (371 BC) and Mantinea (362 BC), it was considered the height of folly for any Greek city to send its army into Sparta.
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