The First Clash (28 page)

Even without the support of the Athenian colonists, Eretria was not defenseless. It had strong walls and three thousand hoplites to defend them. This was not enough men to meet the imposing Persian army in the field, but if they remained resolute, it was more than enough to hold the walls. When the Persians arrived, they wasted no time before trying to carry the city by assault. They failed, as they were to fail for the next six days. The fighting was fierce, and many fell on both sides. But on the seventh day, two prominent citizens, Euphorbos and Alkimachos, betrayed their city and allowed the Persians entry. History is silent about the fate of the traitors, but the Persians plundered the city, set its temples afire, enslaved its remaining citizens, and then prepared them for transport to Persia.

Their first objective accomplished, the Persians lingered on the island for several days. Assumedly, they needed a period of time to recover from the damage the Eretrians had done to them. Furthermore, by this time they would have been on the move for many weeks and the supplies with which they had started were probably exhausted. Before they could begin the next phase of the expedition, they needed to gather stores, while the horses required time to adjust their systems from fodder to grass.
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Datis had now accomplished half his mission, but the real prize was just across the narrow gulf. Although he was confident of success, he was also an experienced commander. He would not rush.

But the Persians had made one massive and irredeemable mistake at Eretria. By destroying the city and enslaving the population, they had sent a message to the Athenians. It was precisely the wrong message, because just as in Eretria, there was considerable dissension in Athens as to what course to take against the Persian threat. For the moment, those pushing for resistance had the upper hand, but there were many who wanted to find some accommodation with the invader. Eretria’s fate ended Athenian dissension. In a moment of folly, Datis had alerted the Athenians that despite
the fact that their old tyrant Hippias was with his army, accepting him back in return for peace was not an option. Their city was to be burned and a large number of them were to be shipped to Persia as slaves of the Great King.

When Datis’s Persians met Athens’s hoplites, he encountered a force unified behind a single policy—conquer or die. All knew that defeat meant doom not just for themselves, but for their families as well.

THE PLAIN OF MARATHON

E
arly in August 490 BC, the Persian army landed at Marathon. The site was chosen for a number of reasons. Probably the most important was the advice of Hippias, who was now near eighty and making a final bid for power.
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He surely had memories of being a young man and landing on this same coast with his father, Pisistratus. At that time, the hill people had rallied to his father’s cause and joined him on his triumphal march into Athens. No doubt Hippias expected a similar welcome on this occasion and promised as much to the Persians. It must have come as a shock to him and a depressing surprise to Datis that much had changed in Attica since Spartan arms had sent Hippias packing. The hill people may still have had complaints, but they preferred to address them through democratic councils rather than count on the possibly fleeting goodwill of a tyrant.
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Rather than march immediately on Athens, the Persians tarried on the coastal plain for an extended period.
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How long is uncertain, but it was long enough to allow the Athenians to mass on the only practicable exit. Some have argued that the Persians halted to await the followers of Hippias, whom they expected to rally to his cause. Others claim the Persians waited in hopes that those Athenians supporting an accommodation with Darius would carry the day and the Persian army could march into the city unopposed. Both answers appear to be faulty. Datis was an experienced commander and would have made his plans or dispositions based on military realities, not on the uncertain hope of a popular uprising. There is a simple military explanation for the Persian delay: Even a modern amphibious landing is a scene of almost unparalleled chaos.
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Unloading
thousands of men, tons of supplies, and possibly a thousand horses from unsteady wood ships, beached or lying in the shallows, would have been a nightmare. At the least, it would have taken the better part of the day to unload and get organized. With that done, or while it was ongoing, the Persians would have had to build a fortified camp as a base. Behind this, they would have had to construct palisades along the beach to protect their ships when they marched off to Athens. If they failed to do this, the Athenians surely had enough troops to dispatch to the beach and set the ships afire, leaving the Persians trapped in Attica.
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On top of this, another simple explanation must be added: Although the Athenians could not have known where the Persians would land, the Plain of Marathon must have been on the top of their list. After all, it had a lot to recommend it. As Herodotus says, the plain was an excellent piece of ground for the employment of cavalry. Moreover, it had a promontory that stuck out almost ninety degrees from the shore that provided the fleet a large degree of protection from the elements—a natural port. It was also far enough from Athens to ensure the Persians could land without fearing the Athenian army would be upon them before they completed unloading, but close enough for them to reach Athens in a single day’s hard march, if the gates were open to them.

However, the doors remained closed. The Athenians had not been at war almost constantly for the past twenty years without learning anything. The Plain of Marathon may have had a lot of advantages for the Persians, but it also had a very serious disadvantage: There was only one exit from the plain that was suitable for the rapid movement of an army.
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It is almost inconceivable that the Athenians would not have strongly outposted this exit, as it had been the road used by the last successful invader of Attica—Pisistratus. The reason the Persians did not march off the Plain of Marathon was that there were several hundred determined hoplites standing behind a fortified wall across the southern road.
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They could not have held this Thermopylae-like position indefinitely, but they did not have to. By the time the Persians had assembled sufficient forces to be certain of overrunning the Greek position, the rest of the Athenian army had arrived.
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The Athenians would have been alerted to the Persian landings, probably by smoke signals, within an hour of the first ship making shore. Herodotus tells us that they marched immediately to meet the threat, and there is no reason to believe it took them very long to muster their forces. The army would have begun mustering on the Persian approach across the
Aegean and had likely been standing ready since Eretria fell.
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All it needed was a direction in which to march and the order to go. That they would march had been decided by the Athenians some time ago. Although we are not privy to the debates over whether it was best to march out and confront the enemy or to follow Eretria’s example and try to hold the walls, we are certain they took place. Both Aristotle and Plutarch make reference to such deliberations and credit Miltiades with convincing the Athenian assembly that their best choice was to fight on the open field.
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If there were any lingering uncertainties about forgoing the safety of Athens’s walls, the fate of Eretria must have sealed the case. Moreover, marching out for a direct confrontation was always the natural inclination of a Greek city-state. Also, any decision in favor of fighting from behind walls would have come with a significant cost, even if the Persians were held at bay. At least two-thirds of the population of Attica could not fit inside the walls and would have been at the mercy of the invader.
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Moreover, it was close to harvesttime, and the grain was vulnerable to fire.
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If the Persians destroyed it, Athens could not be sure of replacing it, as the Persian fleet was now positioned to blockade Athenian trade routes. Furthermore, if the Persians destroyed Attica’s olive trees, they would undermine the region’s economy for a generation.
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It is, however, interesting to speculate on the plight of a Persian army busily besieging ten thousand Athenian hoplites when fifteen thousand Spartans and their Peloponnesian allies marched into their rear.

For the Spartans had already been sent for.

At the same time the Athenian army had marched to Marathon, the Athenians had sent one of their day runners, Pheidippides, to Sparta to enlist the support of the finest army in Greece.
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Pheidippides arrived in Sparta the next day and announced to the magistrates, “Spartans, the Athenians beg you to rush to their defense and not look on passively as the most ancient city in Hellas falls into slavery imposed by barbarians, for in fact Eretria has already been enslaved, and thus Hellas has become weaker by one city.” The Spartans would have been under no illusion as to their eventual fate if Athens fell, so they resolved to help. Unfortunately for Athens, they were celebrating one of their many religious festivals and could not march until the full moon. Many commentators have interpreted this procrastination as reflective of a secret desire to see Athens defeated. However, the Spartans were a notoriously pious people, so this explanation is believable. Furthermore, there is no evidence that anyone in the ancient world doubted Spartan veracity on this matter. The fact that
the first two thousand Spartans arrived as soon after the full moon as they did demonstrates that they were massed on the edge of the Spartan border before the festival ended and had force marched the entire distance. There is one further possible explanation for why the entire Spartan army did not march immediately or why, when it did, only two thousand hoplites were immediately sent. Plato says that the Spartans were late for Marathon because at the time they were engaged in a war against Messene (a helot revolt).
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There is enough other evidence to make a convincing case that the Spartans were having troubles at home, but it is impossible to gauge their extent.
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The Athenian vanguard would have arrived at Marathon in less than half a day and was probably there before sunset. Assumedly, the ten generals (one from each tribe) and the polemarch, Callimachus, were among the first to arrive. From the hills, they watched over thirty-five thousand Persians deploy across the plain and tens of thousands more sailors lounging near the shore, preparing an evening meal. One wonders if the clever old soldier Callimachus surveyed the ground and smiled. The Persians had placed themselves in a bottle, and he was the cork. All he had to do was bide his time; nature would do the rest.

To understand why this was so, we have to discuss the most important element of war, and the one most ignored by many classicists who have written about Marathon: logistics. The Persians had begun this campaign over a month earlier. What supplies they started with were used up. They may have been able to get some replenishment in Eretria, but it is doubtful the city offered them much after being besieged for a week, at a time when their grain supplies would already have been low, as the new harvest was still in the fields. The eighty thousand men of the Persian force (soldiers and sailors) would have required at least 225,000 pounds of grain and 50,000 gallons of water a day just for the men. The horses would have needed another 25,000 pounds of feed (assuming they could not go out grazing in the presence of the Athenian army) and 10,000 gallons of water per day. The Persians might have supplied the water with some difficulty from a local stream, some wells, and possibly the Great Marsh at Marathon, if it was not overly salty. However, it is unlikely these sources could have provided all of the water needed. Moreover, it should be assumed the Athenians would have dammed up the stream as it left the hills and may even have poisoned it with a few dead animals.

In any case, the food problem was almost insurmountable. There was no possible chance that the Persians could have set up anything approaching
an effective commissariat with which to draw supplies from the local area. It is almost certain that strong garrisons and roving patrols of light troops and hoplites were all along the mountains and even in the hinterland to prevent the Persians from foraging. Besides, no foraging party could have left the plain without being observed by the Athenians posted in the hills. From that point forward, the life expectancy of the foragers would have been drastically shortened.
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Moreover, even if the fleet could have been organized to ferry supplies from nearby islands, one can assume that the food stores on these islands would also be running close to empty as the harvest season approached. Even at half rations, the Persian army would be starving in a matter of days.

If logistics are often neglected, there is one other topic that is never mentioned by historians and frequently forgotten by soldiers. Delicately said, the amount of fecal matter an army can produce in a very short time (on full or half rations) is, to put it mildly, amazing.
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Given the sanitation practices of ancient armies, as many as eighty thousand men trapped in a restricted space would have found conditions unlivable within a remarkably short time. Tarrying too long not only would be unpleasant, but would have given time for the inevitable to happen. That great killer of ancient armies—disease—would have struck, and the Persian army would have vanished in the twinkling of an eye.