The great Persian War and its preliminaries

by G. B. Grundy

The charge against the Alkmæonidæ does not seem to have been a late interpolation into the Marathon tradition. Pind. Pyth. vii. 15. Pindar, in one of his odes, which bears traces of having been composed shortly after 486, hints strongly that sinister reports on this subject were existent even at that time.

It is possible to fail to recognize the wide difference between the mental attitude of the European Greek to the Persian before and after the decade of 490–480. Before 490, Medism had not acquired the loathsome significance of twelve years later.

Nor, again, if the Alkmæonidæ and the faction which they led did Medize on this occasion, was the act without precedent in the case of Athens herself. Between fifteen and twenty years before, Athenian ambassadors had given earth and water to Artaphernes at Sardes. Their act had, indeed, been condemned upon their return; but there is no reason to suppose that the condemnation was unanimous; and there is every reason to believe that they would never have so acted, had they not had good grounds for thinking that a majority or a party of their fellow-country-men would approve of what they had done.

The sudden withdrawal of Athenian assistance from the Ionian revolt within a year of that assistance having been granted is most explicable on the assumption that within that year a philo-Medic party had once more acquired the ascendency.

The punishment of Phrynichos for his drama on the capture of Miletus looks very much like the work of the same party.

It seems clear that the democrats in Athens had not found that the expulsion of the tyrant Hippias had brought unmixed blessings in its train. They were thereafter face to face with a strong internal opposition, in the shape of a powerful aristocratic party; and threatened from outside by a Sparta which repented of the part it had played in Hippias’ expulsion, and was exasperated at having been fooled by Delphi at the instigation of the Alkmæonidæ. It is not, then, strange that the democrats should look abroad for help of which they saw no prospect nearer home.

The situation of the democratic party had been very unstable. Its sympathies had been balanced on a razor’s edge, ready to incline to the one side or the other on the slightest shifting of the weights in the political scale. The severities of the last years of the rule of Hippias, after the murder of Hipparchos, had been sufficient to make it passively acquiesce when the intrigues of the Alkmæonidæ against the tyrant were brought to a successful termination by the agency of Sparta; but they had not wholly blotted out the memory of the fact that the triumph of Peisistratos had been in a very real sense the triumph of democracy.

By the reforms of Kleisthenes, however, the Alkmæonidæ had made a strong and successful bid for popular favour; and from 509 onward the fortunes of the democratic party were closely linked with those of this powerful clan.

The opposition, backed by the influence of the repentant Sparta, was dangerously strong. First one side and then the other held the upper hand; but, in the years immediately preceding Marathon, the political fortunes of the democrats seem to have been at a low ebb. There had been one great trial of strength. Miltiades had arrived in Athens in 493, an exile from his tyranny in the Thracian Chersonese, driven out by the Persians. POSITION OF THE DEMOCRATS IN 490. He was not likely to sympathize with any party which had shown leanings towards Persia; he seems, indeed from the moment of his return, to have set himself up and to have been recognized as the champion of the aristocratic and anti-Persian party. As such he was attacked by the democrats, being prosecuted on a charge of “tyranny” in the Chersonese. His acquittal was a great victory for the aristocrats, and a severe blow for their opponents.

From 493 to 490 his party seems to have been in power. It is quite evident, at any rate, that he was the foremost man in Athens at the time of Marathon.