H. v. 55.
From Sparta Aristagoras went to Athens. His arrival was, in a sense, opportune. The demand of Artaphernes for the reinstatement of Hippias had created an intensely bitter feeling of hostility towards the Persian. Introduced before the public assembly, he used the same arguments as he had employed at Sparta, and further claimed that the Milesians were Athenian colonists. “There is nothing that he did not promise, so urgent was his request, until he persuaded them.”
AID FROM GREECE.
Herodotus is at considerable pains to show the depth of the folly, as he conceived it to be, with which Athens entered upon a fatal venture.
In the end the Athenians voted an aid of twenty ships; not a small number, when it is remembered that their navy at this time was but a fraction of what it was twenty years later. H. v. 97. “These ships were a source of woes to the Greeks and the barbarians,” says Herodotus. There can be no doubt as to his meaning. He regarded this as the decisive moment in the relations between Persia and European Greece.
The tale of the revolt is that part of his history in which he allows his own personal views to be most clearly seen. To him it seemed the great mistake of the century; that is clear from his story of it; but it is not so easy to say why he so utterly condemned it, unless he regarded it as leading to the renewal of those designs on Greece which Darius had been obliged for ten years past to lay aside.
But that cannot have been all. It is necessary to examine the whole story as told by him. That alone can afford some clear clue to the causes which brought about what was undoubtedly a strange perversion of his judgment.
H. v. 98.
Aristagoras, he says, returned from Athens to Miletus, “having devised a plan from which no advantage was fated to come to the Ionians.”
It must have been in the winter of 499 B.C. or early spring of the year 498 that Aristagoras returned.