Enough has been said about him in connection with his organization of the empire to make it unnecessary to write his obituary here.
Singularly able, singularly enlightened, and, for the time in which he lived, singularly humane, he stands forth in history as the greatest Oriental that ever ruled in Western Asia.
In the year after Darius died the revolt in Egypt was suppressed.
During the six years which followed the Marathonian campaign the march of events at Athens had been rapid.
The victory won by the democratic party in securing the condemnation of Miltiades (probably in 489) shows that, after Marathon, the finely balanced political scale had inclined in their direction.[88] The full reasons for this change in the political situation are unknown, but the failure at Paros must have largely contributed to it, if it was not its main cause. But the democratic party which came into power somewhere towards the close of 489 was a very different party to that of two years earlier. Its Peisistratid leanings had been brought to a violent and sudden end by the events of 490, and tyranny and its attendant medism were for ever dead in Athens.
Still the fact that Aristides held an archonship in the official year 489–488, suggests that the triumph was a triumph of a moderate and not of an extreme democracy, the triumph of a party largely recruited from among the moderates who must have supported the aristocrats in their ascendency during the years preceding 490. This section would require no urging to a policy of “anti-tyrannis”; and it may well have been the case that the main body of the democrats, with eyes now opened to the real nature of that they had misjudged, were anxious, under the new order of things, to purge themselves of their past sins by the punishment of those who had led them astray.
In the year after Aristides’ archonship the law of ostracism was passed. It was immediately put in operation against the close friends of tyranny, three being sent into exile, among them Megakles the Alkmæonid. This in 488–487.
In the next year, the application of the lot to the selection of archons robbed those officials of much of their prestige, if not of their power.
Changed alike in sentiment and policy, the democracy of Athens developed in the years immediately following Marathon into that intensely patriotic party which contributed so largely to the salvation of Greece in the greater war which was soon to come.
It was probably in the latter half of the ten years’ interval that hostilities with Ægina broke out afresh. The two powers were still at enmity in 481, when the Greeks, in view of the great invasion which then so manifestly threatened them, sought to bring about a reconciliation between such of the Greek states as were at variance with one another.